I have listened to the criticisms arrayed against intelligent design (ID) and have given them some thought. The two primary complaints against ID are thus: one, ID is merely a slick repackaging of creationism, and two, ID is built on the ‘god-of-the-gaps’ argument.
First, creationism, be it ‘scientific’ or not, is primarily an issue of biblical hermeneutics. Creationism starts and ends with the first eleven chapters of Genesis. I am not making a statement about the veracity of the biblical account of creationism. What I am inferring, to reiterate, is that creationism is wed to one interpretation of the biblical creation narrative. In contrast, ID is divorced from any text of antiquity.
While some who affirm ID have definitive theological points of view, such does not invalidate the premise that ID is theologically quite neutral. While ID, like Darwinism, has metaphysical implications, ID does not attempt to identify or psychoanalyze the designer. Such is beyond the scope of ID. What ID does infer is that there are information-rich biological structures in nature that cannot be accounted for by Darwinian natural selection. The inability of Darwinism to explain the origins of certain complex structures is not due to a lack of knowledge about these structures. It is not due to gaps in our knowledge that we attempt fill with a presupposition that God is directly and supernaturally responsible for phenomena that we cannot explain naturalistically by our current state of understanding. ID is based on what we do know about inviolate laws of natural phenomena. The overarching question is can we identify intelligent design in nature and distinguish it from that which merely has the appearance of design? If I walk along a deserted beach and see words written in the sand, do I say to myself, “My, how interesting that the forces of nature, that wind, water, and sand, came together to form this message.”? As an analogy, what is SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the attempt to locate information rich radio signals emanating from points beyond our solar system, but a validation that we can identify constructs in nature that are intelligently designed? It is precisely what we do know that validates ID, not what we do not know. The gaps within the Darwinist model are expanding with increase in understanding, and no solution to the mystery of abiogenesis seems forthcoming.
In the bigger picture, I believe a strong argument could be made that neither ID, creationism, or evolutionary thought are scientific in the purest since of the word, but more they inhabit the realm of the metaphysical. A scientific theory must be falsifiable, useful in predicting phenomena, and supported by observation of phenomena. If ID events, or ‘creation,’ occurred, it occurred in the past and is not observed to be occurring now. If ‘molecules to man’ evolution occurred, it occurred in the past and proceeds too slowly to be observed. Neither model is falsifiable. Evolutionary thought is so plastic that it can be molded to fit any observed phenomena. Even the noted philosopher of science, Karl Popper, states that evolution is metaphysical rather than scientific. Perhaps it is more appropriate to refer evolution and ID as conceptual frameworks, as models to which data is correlated, and the model that most closely fits the data is the more viable.
