Intelligent Design Grounded in Science

CBN.com – SEATTLE, Washington - The Dover, Pennsylvania school board is on trial in the state capitol. Their crime? They wanted to tell high school students once a year that evolution is only a theory. They also wanted to mention an alternate theory: Intelligent Design, or ID.

That was too much for some parents. They sued, claiming ID is religious and therefore illegal in school. The judge will decide the case in the next few weeks.

So is ID really just religion in disguise? Do both biology and astronomy support ID? And who are these people promoting ID?

To answer those questions, we went to the Discovery Institute in Seattle, the major proponents of ID.

Dr. Stephen Meyer is the head of Discovery's Center for Science and Culture. He says to ban design theory as mere religion is wrong.

"And in fact,” Meyer said, “it's a science-based argument that may have implications that are favorable to a theistic worldview, but the argument is based on scientific evidence."

Mayer stated, "These are people with serious academic training. They are Ph.D.s from very, not just reputable -- but elite -- institutions. And they are people doing research on the key pressure points in biology and physics, and so their arguments are based on cutting-edge knowledge of developments in science."

So what is the evidence from researchers like biochemist Dr. Michael Behe, a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute?

He is an expert on a special kind of bacteria called flagella. Inside the bacteria are exquisitely engineered ‘inboard motors’ that spin at an amazing 100,000 revolutions per minute.

Darwin said that such complexity must have developed piece by piece. Behe said that is bunk. All the pieces must be in place at the same time or the motorized tails would never work.

Behe makes the case for ID in a video called "Unlocking the Mystery of Life." The video’s narrator declares, “A thimbleful of liquid can contain four million single-celled bacteria, each packed with circuits, assembly instructions, and molecular machines..."

"There are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one end of the cell to the other,” Behe explained. “There are machines that capture the energy from sunlight, and turn it into usable energy."

ID experts say the more you know about biology -- and some of the weird creatures like this island lizard -- the worse it gets for Darwinism.

Consider the workings of the genetic code. That code produces all kinds of molecular machines, plus all the other components of life. ID advocates say that to believe those components are just Darwinian accidents takes a blind faith in the creativity of dumb molecules.

So with growing evidence of ID, isn't Lehigh University proud of this cutting-edge scientist who teaches there—and wrote the 1996 bestseller "Darwin's Black Box?" Hardly.

In August, all the other (22) biology faculty members came out with a political statement on the department's Web site. They stated that "Intelligent design has no basis in science."

Dr. John West, a political scientist at Seattle Pacific University, is senior fellow at Discovery Institute. He says these political responses to scientific issues are getting nasty.

West remarked that "hate speech, speech codes, outright persecution, and discrimination is taking place on our college campuses, in our school districts, against both students and teachers and faculty members."

In fact, universities are evolving into centers for censorship. Five years ago, Baylor University dismissed mathematician Dr. William Dembski from his position, primarily because he headed a center for ID there.

This September, the University of Idaho banned any dissent against evolution from science classes -- a slam on university biologist Dr. Scott Minnich, a noted supporter of ID.

"The school seems to be confusing where it's at,” West said. “Is it in Moscow, Idaho, or the old Moscow, Russia? ...in issuing this edict that…no view differing form evolution can be taught in any science class."

And at Iowa State University, more than 100 faculty members have signed a petition against ID -- an apparent political attempt to intimidate ISU astronomer Dr. Guillermo Gonzalez because he writes about ID.

Gonalez is, in fact, co-author with philosopher Dr. Jay Richards of "The Privileged Planet." Both scholars are also connected with the Discovery Institute.

The book and related video argue that astronomy also shows evidence of design. For instance, the earth has numerous aspects just right for our existence.

Gonzalez explained, "...We find that we need to be at the right location in the galaxy...that we're in the circumstellar habitable zone of our star (correct distance from the sun)...that we're in a planetary system with giant planets that can shield the inner planets from too many comet impacts...that we're orbiting the right kind of star -- it's not too cool and not too hot.”

These are just four of 20 some characteristics of earth that make our planet unique -- right for life, right for discovery by human science.

Richards said, "So you have life and the conditions for discovery happening at the same places. That, to us, suggests that there is something more than a cosmic lottery going on. That sounds like a conspiracy rather than a mere coincidence. So that to me is a tie-breaker in the question."

And there is more -- the finely-tuned underlying rules of the universe-- or physical constants. One of them is gravity. But what if gravity were not constant?

A film clip from Privileged Planet says: "Imagine a machine able to control the strength of each of the physical constants. If you changed even slightly from its current setting, the strength of any of these fundamental forces -- such as gravity -- the impact on life would be catastrophic."

In plain terms, a bit more gravity would mean any creature larger than the size of a pea would be crushed into nothing. And a little less gravity would mean that the Earth would come unglued and fly off into space.

But Darwinism has been maintaining that advanced life is easy to produce all over the universe.

"Almost everything we've learned in the area of astrobiology suggests that, 'Look, this is just not going to happen very often' -- now that might be sort of depressing for script writers for sci-fi movies, but that's where the evidence is taking us," Richards said.

Despite the attacks on ID, Meyer said the design interpretation of the evidence is exposing Darwinism as a theory in crisis:

"I think we're reaching the critical point where Darwinism is going be seen as simply inadequate,” Meyer asserted, “ -- and therefore the question of (intelligent) design is back on the table."

Just as this city of Seattle has all the earmarks of ID, so does nature, except that nature is infinitely more intricate.

The hypotheses of Erasmus Darwin was replaced by lamarckism, which was replaced by Darwinism, which was replaced by neo-darwinism, which undoubtedly will be replaced by something else, and maybe not in our lifetime.

...and the cartoonish misrepresentations of science march on...

No, sorry, you have grossly distorted the actual history of evolutionary biology.

The primary distortion is the common creationist misrepresentation which pretends that every so many years, science has to completely throw out old theories and "replace" them with entirely new ones, and that all you have to do is wait for current theories to be found "wrong" as well. This is false.

Instead, what happens the great majority of the time is that older versions of theories are *augmented* with new refinements, which make them continually more complete and accurate than ever.

Let's take your distortion as an example:

The hypotheses of Erasmus Darwin

Yes, Erasmus Darwin was one of the early scientists who conceived of an evolutionary origin of species from one or more first forms, instead of "separate creation" for each species or "kind". However, this was just an idea and he suggested no specific mechanisms for this notion, it hardly rose even to the level of "hypothesis" in the scientific sense. In 1802 he wrote the verse:

Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

This is *still* an accurate (and poetic) description of modern evolutionary biology's position on the rise of modern life forms from microscopic beginnings ("spheric glass" refers to early microscope lenses). So it's disingenuous for you to say it has been "replaced" by anything which came afterwards.

was replaced by lamarckism,

Wrong. Even Lamarck's attempts to envision a mechanism by which evolution might proceed was no "replacement" for Erasmus Darwin's idea of common descent via modification, it was a hypothesis about how that might have occurred.

which was replaced by Darwinism,

Wrong again. You make it sound as if Lamarckism had been widely adopted as the accepted theory of evolution, and then Darwin's explanation came along and kicked it out. This is not the case. Lamarckism -- and indeed the concept of evolutionary common descent in general -- was widely discussed and debated in the early 1800's, but had never been accepted as the dominant paradigm.

Even if it had, "Darwinism" would not have been a subsequent "replacement" of Lamarckism, it would have been a modification of only one of its tenets. Lamarck actually got most of his hypothesis correct. The place where he went astray was to propose that variation arose within individuals (i.e. acquired during their lifetimes) and then passed on to their children. Darwin correctly held that instead variation is born into individuals as variations which *depart* from that of their parents. The rest of the Lamarckian model was and still is accurate.

which was replaced by neo-darwinism,

This is the biggest lie in your account. Neo-Darwinism in no way "replaces" original Darwinism, it *expands* on it by adding subsequent discoveries which were unknown in Darwin's time, such as the behavior of DNA -- DNA was discovered much later. But all this subsequent addition of knowledge to the original core of Darwin's theory has only *validated* Darwin, not refuted or replaced him. I can't think of a single thing which Darwin put into "Origin of Species" which has actually had to be "replaced".

Indeed, offhand I can think of only one idea he had that turned out to be mistaken, and even that was still half right. He postulated that the brilliant colors of male butterflies was shaped via sexual selection by female butterflies. Actually, research has discovered that it *is* due to sexual selection, but by other *male* butterflies (it's how they recognize each other and is what triggers their territorial fight response in order to protect their access to females). Butterfly coloration (as Darwin realized) is also shaped by other factors, of course, such as predator recognition, protective camouflage, warning colors, etc. But female butterflies for the most part will "mate" with anything which does the "mating dance" in the right way and has the right pheremones.

which undoubtedly will be replaced by something else, and maybe not in our lifetime.

Dream on. Evolutionary biology will no doubt add even more to its body of knowledge, and some portions of it will be adjusted accordingly, but it is so extremely and overwhelmingly supported by such massive volumes of evidence and research that the odds of it actually being "replaced" in any large part are quite close to zero. Not even Darwin's original writings have needed "replacing" yet, they have held up incredibly well for a 150-year old theory.

In contrast, Newton's Laws of Motion have needed extensive modification and "special case" exceptions to account for relativity and quantum physics. And even then, this actually refutes the creationist notion of science having to "clean house" and throw out old accepted theories -- while Newton's Laws have had to be augmented with new knowledge about relativity and QM, they were never "replaced" or "thrown out" or found to be "wrong" in the sense of 100% incorrect. Newton's Laws are *still* correct for the appropriate applications (i.e. objects and speeds on the human scale).

From http://www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/CompLexicon/godel.html

In 1931 the mathematician and logician Kurt Godel proved that within a formal system questions exist that are neither provable nor disprovable on the basis of the axioms that define the system. This is known as Godel's Undecidability Theorem. He also showed that in a sufficiently rich formal system in which decidability of all questions is required, there will be contradictory statements. This is known as his Incompleteness Theorem. In establishing these theorems Godel showed that there are problems that cannot be solved by any set of rules or procedures; instead for these problems one must always extend the set of axioms. This disproved a common belief at the time that the different branches of mathematics could be integrated and placed on a single logical foundation.

Alan Turing later provided a constructive interpretation of Godel's results by placing them on an algorithmic foundation: There are numbers and functions that cannot be computed by any logical machine.

More recently, Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician working at IBM, has stressed that Godel's and Turing's results set fundamental limits on mathematics.

These results, along with quantum uncertainty and the unpredictability of determinstic (chaotic) systems, form a core set of limitations to scientific knowledge that have only come to be appreciated during this century.

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	A	B	C	D
1	You have no evidence	Stalin	materialist	I never said that!
2	Hillary	homosexual	Piltdown Man	You're no Christian!
3	liberal science	God-hater	government grants	What are you afraid of?
4	Hitler	You have no proof	communist	2nd Law of Thermodynamics
5	atheist	nazi	Pol Pot	gaps in fossil record
6	prove the origin of life	Christian-bashing	Darwin worship	I'm not [.....], you are!
7	arrogant jerk	take your meds	[any scripture passage]	You're foaming at the mouth
8	It's only a theory!	Were you there?	Noah's Ark	macro-evolution is impossible
9	It's all speculation!	[quote any creationist website]	Darwin leads to Marxism	My granddaddy was no ape
10	Stop the censorship!	That's a "just so" story!	Darwin was a racist	the odds are against evolution