How to Understand Intelligent Design

Over the last several years, advocates of creationism—that is, the belief that the world was created a short time ago by a supreme deity, and evolution is a myth perpetrated by scientists—have adopted a new tack to get their views disseminated in classrooms. What they’ve come up with is a theory called “intelligent design,” which basically presents religious views under a pseudo-scientific guise. Here’s a quick guide to grasping what intelligent design (or “ID,” as it’s commonly known) is all about.

Instructions

Difficulty: Easy

1. Understand ID’s basic premises. What fuels the “scientific” side of ID is the uncontested fact that a cell is an incredibly complicated mechanism, relying on the interplay of hundreds of genes, proteins and assorted chemicals in various feedback loops. According to ID theorists, these chemical pathways are way too complicated to have arisen naturally, even over the course of billions of years of evolution, and therefore must have been “designed.”
2. Familiarize yourself with the “god of the gaps.” Throughout the history of science, whenever a phenomenon has (initially) resisted explanation, religious folks have invoked supernatural causes. Basically, what the ID movement is saying is that because we don’t (yet) understand how a cell could have evolved by biochemical evolution, that cell must have been “designed.” This is what philosophers call the “god of the gaps,” the “gaps” referring to the gaps in scientific knowledge as it currently exists.
3. Don’t be fooled by the term “designer.” ID proponents are strangely silent about exactly what they’re referring to when they use the word “designer.” The reason for this is very simple: Invoking a “designer” sounds vaguely scientific (and hence teachable in schools), while using the word “god,” which is what ID believers really mean, works against that goal. Think about it: Do you think ID proponents would go to all this trouble if they thought primitive cells were engineered by superintelligent amoebas in the Andromeda galaxy?
4. Check the facts used by ID “experts.” Since the average person doesn’t know the fine details of evolutionary science, it’s easy for ID proponents to muddy the waters by referring to “irreducibly complex” systems that seem unlikely to have evolved by natural selection. However, if you bother to check their sources, you’ll see that mainstream scientists have plenty of ideas about how these systems could have evolved naturally—and why they may not be “irreducibly complex” after all.
5. Be aware of what you’re being sold. As stated above, it’s common knowledge among scientists and educated members of the public that ID is a code word for “creationism.” Despite its scholarly trappings, ID is not a “science” the way physics or biology are sciences—it’s a bogus discipline that conforms to the anti-scientific beliefs of religious fundamentalists.

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