Editor’s Desk
by Frank R. Zindler

Intelligent Design?

Darwin might as well never have existed. His mechanistic, materialistic explanation of the appearance of design in the living world is not comprehended by the antiscience voices that chorus ever louder in the public theater we euphemistically call “American culture.” Driven by the same fearful superstitions that motivated Darwin’s opponents nearly a century and a half ago, propelled by the same theological gaseous discharges that launched the attackers of Galileo and Copernicus centuries before him, today’s “creation scientists” have mounted an attack on science with a ferocity not seen since the burning of the library at Alexandria. Just as the burners of the books enlisted the aid of the Most Christian Emperor Theodosius, our modern benighted Knights of God have been wined and dined by Capitol Hill ultra-Christian legislators and given the opportunity to instruct our federal Solons on the “evidence” for what they term “Intelligent Design.”

Already turned into the buzzonym ID, this idea - resurrected from the theologizing of several centuries ago - would have it that the complexity we see in nature cannot be natural: impersonal, blind forces acting over time cannot produce the complexity observed in living things. Such complexity can only be the result of design - intelligent design: ID. If there is a design, there must be a designer. Ecce Deus! Behold! God! Science now is claimed to be proof of the existence of a god. Some even specify the Christian god.

Philosophers would say that the ID solution is simply the old fallacy known as ignotum per ignotius - explaining the unknown in terms of the more unknown. They would point out that even if ID could be shown to have a solid basis in scientific fact, it would only argue for one or more designers, not creators. After all, when a human designs a watch, say, or a germ warfare agent, all that is created is order. The elements from which the design takes shape are preexisting. The designer is not a creator. Even if the designer of ID theologizing could be shown to exist, it would still leave unanswered the question of the origin of the universe and its material components. ID cannot provide the proof it promises. Moreover, given the oddities we see in nature, the design analogy might better lead to the conclusion that our living world was designed by a committee of designers - no member of which possessed intelligence superior to the average “creation scientist.”

In 1859, when Darwin published On The Origin Of Species, the progenitors of ID theology howled that dumb and blind natural selection could never produce a wing, a lung, or an eye. It was asserted that such things were irreducibly complex. Half a wing would be no good as a wing or a leg either one, it was charged. A partial eye was unimaginable as a useful organ. It wasn’t long, however, before the origins of wings and lungs and eyes were explained by compelling arguments revealing those organs not to be irreducibly complex. Step-by-step scenarios were reconstructed to explain their origins, with no step along the way being dysfunctional or without selective advantage.

Move the little hand on the clock forward 140 years and what to we find the Natural Theology devotees arguing? Irreducible complexity again - but now on the microscopic and molecular scale. Despite the discovery of DNA and the genetic code (which provide a completely adequate chemical basis for evolution), the latter-day ID-ers now claim that metabolic cycles, fla-gella, and molecular rotary motors in cells are irreducibly complex evidences of intelligent design.

What is an Atheist to think? For the most part, the phenomena that so excite the ID-ers are of extremely recent discovery. Most were not known when I was in high school, many weren’t known when I was in graduate school. Is it so shocking that scientific explanations for many of these phenomena are lacking? Science cannot solve problems before they are identified. Science is not theology.

But fear not. The great advances being made in the area of molecular evolution - especially the evolution of proteins, together with the triumph of the various genome projects - will yield satisfying mechanistic solutions to all the problems posed by the ID poseurs. Even as I write, many of the puzzles produced by the Capitol Hill lecturers have already been resolved without any need for magic. All will be resolved within a few years.

What will the ID apologists do then? I would suggest they address the problem of bad design in nature. They might explain why vertebrate retinas are on backwards - and why male creationists have nipples.

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