I.D. Please?

Cyril C. House
Philosophy of Religion
15/10/2015

I.D., Please?

       Intelligent Design is a fascinating topic of conversation, fascinating in that it remains to be a topic of conversation. This debate may be seen to be quite present in the Dover Trials, as is reported on in NOVA’s Intelligent Design On Trial (Nova). Even in the face of staggering amounts of empirical data, logical explanation and theses, there remain to be a boggling percentage of advocates for Intelligent Design. “The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection” (Intelligent Design). Intelligent Design theorists claim there is evidence that natural selection is incapable of supporting many features of the world; they are wrong. Their need for the comforting embrace of ‘a loving Father’ or a ‘promised land’ lead these people to ignore the facts put in front of them which discredit their claims. I will discuss a few of these topics herein and the reader will see plainly that the ideas of Intelligent Design theorists are not only archaic, but entirely irrational as well.

       “Scientists of the 19th century correctly observed that if a person were so unfortunate as to be missing one of the eye’s many integrated features, such as the lens, or iris, or ocular muscles, the inevitable result would be a severe loss of vision or outright blindness. Thus it was concluded that the eye could only function if it were nearly intact” (Behe). Behe’s argument here is inherently contradictory, he attempts to explain why evolution does not support the functioning eye, yet his statement directly supports the evolution of the eye. Evolution is a series of minute changes over many generations of an organism which cumulatively add up to create a noticeable difference in the organism’s ability to interact with its environment. Behe claims that the eye could only function if it were nearly intact, and that if it were missing one of the major pieces that it still could ‘see’ but with an extremely reduced quality of sight. So let us imagine the eye 100, 000 years ago as having a few less pieces than the contemporary model and we shall call this a ‘simple eye’, now Behe would agree, based on his own conclusion, that the simple eye would still work; not as well as the current model, but nonetheless it functions to some degree. As man goes about using this simple eye the brain is sending energy to operate it, but things are stressful 100, 000 years ago and at some point the brain feels the need to redirect energy normally reserved for operating the simple eye, now to the legs for increased capacity to escape threat. Suddenly the simple eye is attempting to function on 80% of its required energy load, and due to an equilibrium effect in the system the simple eye incorporates some new method to make the best use of the energy it has and here is developed some new crutch (or ‘piece of the system’) to do so; after a myriad of generations of course. The new eye now operates at 100% of the energy it is given, which, with the extra piece, is 100% of the energy it now needs. Another untold progression of generations down the line of this organism’s existence, security is increased and so the need for an increased capacity to escape threat is accordingly decreased. The brain says ‘Oh excellent, I can redistribute energy back towards the eyes’, and does so, leaving the eye with 120% of the energy it needs to operate. Again an equilibrium effect occurs as we progress down through the generational mixes, and the eye, begins to ‘see better’ by burning off this extra energy in using its pieces more effectively. Rinse and repeat this process and one is able to see how an eye might evolve from Behe’s “severe loss of vision” into the ‘intact eye’, for intactness is a matter of perspective: surely when the eye was no more than a light sensitive spot on the face of some organism, it was then to be considered intact, and only as it acquired a more complex construction could it be considered to be anything less than it was and therefore ‘not intact’, but by that point we have already debunked Behe’s myth.

       Another claim by Intelligent Design theorists is a teleological argument stating that “[d]esigned things must have had a designer, and that designer must have had a very great intelligence and created the universe purposefully” (Simanek). The assumption herein is that generally organisms, and especially so in the case of human beings, are beautiful constructions of tissue put together in such a poetic way as to allow for independent motion, choice-making, and in the case of rational organisms, a human can:

“Represent to itself complex states of affairs, including non-actual states of affairs, that are strikingly remote from its present sense-perceptions . . . It can desire that certain states of affairs be actual and others non-actual . . . It can devise plans of action that draw on its beliefs about which states of affairs are actual and non-actual and probable and improbable and about the logical and causal relations that hold among both actual and non-actual states of affairs, in order to attempt to cause states of affairs it values to become actual” (Inwagen).

       In fact organisms are suited so well to their function that such an occurrence, say Design Theorists, could only have been orchestrated by some supernatural force: some ‘Designer’ who intended it all and consciously saw to its becoming. Again I reject their claims and appeal to the forces of evolution, for it has been inductively proven time and time again that evolution is the process of killing organisms which are less suited to the environment than their peers. After six to seven million years (Smithsonian) of killing off the organisms which are less suited to the environment than their peers, exactly what is it one would expect if not a remaining group of organisms which are each highly adapted for very specific functions and set near-absolutely into their own environment? This in no way suggests a Designer, the explanation is simple: organisms die, and some organisms die more easily than others, and when the dead leave behind more suitably adapted kin the status quo of ‘good enough to live’ is raised, rinse and repeat over six million years and the result is a bunch of organisms attempting to keep up with a severely high status quo, yet wielding the attributes to readily compete. The rebuttal of Design Theorists will be to state that it is God, or rather The Designer, that put these systems in place in order to achieve such results; the most accurate refutation of such a claim is stated by Matt Dillahunty: “[t]his is not a Universe fine-tuned for life, this is a life fine-tuned for its Universe”.

       These are two, of many, points made on behalf of Design Theory and the remainder are just as easily disproven. Intelligent Design flies in the face of, or rather crawls at the feet of, modern science. Science is the mechanism with which we are able to deduce claims about the world in which we exist, we can see the things we wish to make claims about and we are able to confirm these claims by means of scientific inquiry. Design Theorists make immense claims about the nature of existence, grounded in supernaturalism, yet to this day there is no known mechanism with which we may verify any claims about the supernatural world. There is absolutely zero empirical evidence to support the claims of Design Theorists, and their opinions are therefore unintelligible; it is difficult to comprehend that so many contemporary minds are influenced by the jargon of Intelligent Design.

Works Cited

Bdw5000. “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design On Trial (creationism vs evolution)”. Youtube. Nova          Institute, 03/11/2011. Web. 20/10/2015. URL = https://www.youtube.com/watch?                                v=x2xyrel-2vI

Behe, Michael. Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference. 2015. PDF file.

Dillahunty, Matt and John Morrison. “A Debate: Does Science Point Us To Or Away From God?”.            Red Deer College. 17/10/2015. Debate.

Inwagen, Peter Van. “The Inhabitants of the World”. Metaphysics. 4 Ed. Westview Press, Boulder,            CO, 2015. 183 – 188. Print.

N.a. “What Does It Mean To Be Human?”. Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.                    13/10/2015. Web. 19/10/2015. URL = http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-                              evolution-timeline-interactive

N.a. “What Is ID”. Intelligent Design Organization.  N.d. URL =                                                                  http://www.intelligentdesign.org/whatisid.php

Simanek, Donald E. “Intelligent Design: The Glass Is Empty”. Lock Haven University. 01/12/2012.          Web. 19/10/2015. URL = http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/philosop/empty.htm