Why You Should Be Suspicious of Intelligent Design Theory

At the risk of preaching to the choir, I want to make some remarks on intelligent design (ID) theory. Specifically, I want to share why a person should be wary of ID, even before s/he knows anything about its gruesome details.

There are two general reasons to mistrust it from the outset.

First, ID offers no positive evidence in its own favor. In fact, anyone who has ever read an ID argument knows that all of their arguments are arguments against evolutionary theory.

Let’s think about this. Suppose I want to prove that my friend Tom is in the kitchen. Will it suffice if I demolish all the arguments in favor of Tom’s being in the living room? Of course not! All I have shown is that there is no reason to believe that Tom is in the living room. I have given no reason to believe that he is in the kitchen.

Of course, showing that there is no reason to think that Tom is in the living room would suffice to prove that he is in the kitchen, provided that it is known beforehand that Tom must be either in the kitchen or in the living room. However, if there is any chance that Tom is in the bathroom, or the bedroom, or the garage, then we cannot justifiably restrict the alternatives. This is called “false dichotomy” and is an illegal maneuver in logic.

ID theory is one enormous false dichotomy. Its proponents believe that, if they can poke enough holes in evolutionary theory, they will have “demonstrated” that their deity exists and is responsible for the design and creation of the world and its living forms.

In the first place, it should be noticed that this strategy rather too conveniently absolves ID theorists of the normal scientific responsibility of rigorously and repeatedly testing any claim about how the world works. In the second place, as David Hume pointed out long ago, even if ID proponents did manage to demolish evolutionary theory, this would not necessarily establish the existence of an intelligent designer, and it certainly would not demonstrate the existence of a particular deity, such as Yahweh, Christ, or Allah. Indeed, it could just as easily be used to prove that our universe is an experiment being conducted by extraterrestrials as that it was created with loving care by God.

The second general reason to mistrust ID theory from the outset is that it is ex post facto in its nature. ID theory is an attempt to justify a set of beliefs that were around long before the need to justify them was felt or the means of justifying them had been developed.

In contrast to a scientifically derived theory, such as evolutionary theory, which is initially surprising and even offensive to popular sensibility but nevertheless prevails on the strength of the evidence, ID theory fits all too comfortably in the worldview of traditional Christians to believe that they are doing anything more dignified or professional than manufacturing “reasons” for believing what they would believe even without those “reasons”.

In other words, ID theory is never the result of putting the hypothesis of an intelligent designer to the test of public and repeatable experiment. Instead, it stems from the desire of a religious faction to subordinate the world to its beliefs, rather than its beliefs to the world.