On the emptiness of "Intelligent Design" creationism



Much of the effort spent staving off the increasing noise coming from ID quarters centers around negating specific objections its proponents raise. While this is easy and satisfying to do, it is not enough. Rather than waiting to fend off the latest attack, it is time to go on the offensive.

'Intelligent design' has a weakness that will contribute to its undoing, and that has simply not been thought through by its proponents. It is precisely the same weakness that falls to the common child's question, "If God made everything, then who made God?"

Since Behe and Dembski and their followers like to use the example of Paley's watch, I will use the same example and show how it undermines the very thing they're arguing for. The watch argument goes like this: since a watch is such an improbable thing to find lying around - unlike, say, a rock - its mere existence hints at the existence of a further entity, namely, the agent that designed the watch. The complexity and functionality of the watch could not have come into being by accident, but must have been -- intelligently designed.

Paley and the Behe-ists now take this argument a step further. They say that a watch designer - in other words, a human - is also a very complex object, so complex that it too could not have come into being by accident. Eyes, brains, flagella, and the rest of them are just like watches in that their existence implies the further existence of an agent who designed them.

So far, the list of entites that imply the existence of designers has two members: watches, and watch designers. Both of these things imply the existence of an entity that designed that thing.

So, Behe is commited to the belief that there are watches, watch designers, and watch designer designers. There's an obvious question in front of us now: are there also watch designer designer... designers?

The affirmative answer seems as well-formed a proposition as any, so let's explore both its negation and its truth. If there are no WDDDs, it must be the case that WDDs do not logically imply the existence of WDDDs. Since Paley and Behe etc. have given us the sufficient conditions that imply design, it must be the case that WDDs do not satisfy these conditions. Therefore, WDDs are not complex but are rather simple, like rocks and other things that do not imply design.

If, on the other hand, WDDs are complex entities like WDs and Ws, then we must be committed to the existence of WDDDs. And now we get to ask the same question about WDDDs. Are they complex? Does their existence imply the existence of a WDDD.. D?

The astute reader will see where I am going with this. IDists are logically bound to claim either one of two things: either the "Designer" they believe in was itself designed by a meta-designer, or the "Designer" was something simple that does not need such an explanation. I have the feeling that they would choose the "simple" option. If that is the case, I have good news for them -- a very lucid and compelling case for a "simple" option was laid out almost 150 years ago, and they can go learn about it at any of the top-tier educational institutes in the world.

Posted: Sun - June 5, 2005 at 12:52 AM | | | |

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