I’ve been thinking about so-called intelligent design (ID) recently, and it occured to me that there are a couple of things that proponents of ID should be doing, but aren’t.

The first one is that they should be looking for and finding evidence for design in every single thing. By this I mean that, instead of limiting themselves to the very limited domains of “evidence” that they say supports their claims, like the bacterial flagellum of e-coli or the blood clotting cycle, they should be able to pick anything at all in the universe, and devise a coherent and testable hypothesis about how it too was “designed”.

The second relates to the ID proponent’s arguments for design. Not only should IDers be able to demonstrate that something was designed, they should also be able to explain how it was created. Advocates who say that they believe the “designer” was a god, like William Dembski (who says that he believes it is the christian god specifically), they should be able to argue, demonstrate and provide evidence for the claim that not only was something designed, but that it was also created, ex-nihilo. I’m guessing that this really applies to those ID proponents that are of the creator-god persuasion of which I’ll hazard that most IDers are; I’ll leave the raelians alone for now.

It’s oft said by creationists/IDers that they’ve never seen a “dog give birth to a bird” or other some such lunacy. By the same token, we should be able to say that we’ve never seen “a dog created ex-nihilo“. I know that I haven’t.

Are they doing these things? I’m not aware of any evidence so far to suggest that they are.

And I hate the fact that when I have to talk about ID, I have to resort to using scare quotes. It makes me feel like I don’t understand the English language properly, but it’s not me who’s doing the equivocating.

This entry was posted Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 3:28 pm and is filed under . You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.