The Problems Of The Problems Of Design

Recently, the Zman took on intelligent design in his post, The Problems Of Design. It includes a clear-headed paragraph on an ailment that plagues science.

Another central claim of Intelligent Design is that the natural world is either the result of chance or design. This is the keystone of their theory, as Intelligent Design is not an affirmative argument in favor of a designer. Instead, they frame the debate as between two competing theories. Therefore, if one is shown to be invalid, by default the other must be true. It is a bit of rhetorical sleight of hand to avoid the central problems of Intelligent Design, which of course is that it can never be proven.

Indeed, the is is the same problem that we see in other fields, such as astrophysics, where the least bad theory is held up as the truth, no matter how awful it is. It seems that the advocates are afraid that admitting the reigning theory is a failure equates to endorsing some lesser theory. It becomes a zero-sum game of truth, where collectively we cannot admit that much of the universe remains mysterious to humans.

Ironically, Z himself falls prey to the same mindset he opposes by defending standard evolution in his critique of intelligent design. (And doing so quite poorly, at that.)

That’s the case with evolutionary biology. Random mutations in the genome are one aspect of the evolutionary process. Environment obviously plays a role here.  Sexual selection is another. Human intervention is another. After all, people have killed off whole species. People have killed off whole groups of people. Like the sportsball game, there are multiple actors, acting and reacting, within a set of rules that science does not fully understand. Evolution is not an argument in favor of chance.

While normally very intelligent and insightful, he seems not to understand how evolution works. Evolution is an argument in favor of chance. That's the whole religion! For all his cogent analyses of the ailments of modern society, he has not yet realized, as we do, that materialism is a disease that infects all aspect of society, including science. Fortunately, he does not necessarily need to understand the fundamentals of evolution to make his point, as he admits.

Even if everything about evolutionary biology is wrong, it does not make Intelligent Design true. It simply means we have no good answer understanding the natural world.

Taking that into consideration with another quote...

This is why ID’er focus all of their energy on the negative argument, making various claims about evolutionary science. That way, the discussion is always on the science, rather than the theology.

seems to imply that Z thinks equates logical arguments against evolution as intelligent design advocacy. It's what drove Vox Day to issue a rebuttal, Statistical analysis is not Intelligent Design. Z concludes his article,

From a mainstream Christian perspective, Intelligent Design has some serious theological problems, with occasionalism being the main one. The one way to solve the theological problems is to move the designer back to the beginning, where the Bible writers preferred to place him. The classic watchmaker model, where God sets the universe in motion, according to a fixed set of rules, with evolution possibly being one of them. That leaves room to debate evolution, but does not make God a villain.

Throughout the piece, he did not adequately make the case that Christianity and occasionalism are at odds. As I recall from my Christian upbringing, the Bible routinely depicts God intervening in human affairs. Why else pray if it does not compel positive changes? Nor did he make a solid case that intelligent design is occasionalism. It merely implies that some intelligence exists that has guided evolution, as it could not have happened by natural selection. He gave a cartoonish depiction of ID conclusions in an earlier paragraph.

Intelligent Design is occasionalism. While the natural world seems to operate along a set of knowable rules, God often intervenes to change results. He is always in that space between cause and effect, ready to alter the relationship according to his design. God created the platypus for reasons only known to God. If he chooses, he can make the Nile flow south or the sky turn pink. The proof of this, according to Intelligent Design, is the variety of species alive today, as well those no longer in existence.

Take away the occasionalism, and God turning the sky pink or whatever, and you're still left with an organism that could not possibly have evolved by random mutations and natural selection as goes the standard dogma. We still have no evidence of a single species, or chromosome, or gene, or allele, being created by random mutation of the sequence of nucleotides. We have no evidence that intelligence is created from non-intelligence.

He says the one way to solve the problem is to move the designer back to the beginning. That's exactly the problem in Big Bang Theory and the theory for the spontaneous generation of life. It is the "one free miracle" that we have talked about here before. At the conclusion, we finally see the motive for writing is that ID implies that God is (as Z states in the prior paragraph) either a "designer without foresight" or a "fickle trickster." Well, that is certainly "an argument built [...] on a false dichotomy."

While we're on the subject, let's look at the first few lines of the Wikipedia entry for intelligent design.

Intelligent design (ID) is a pseudoscientific argument for the existence of God, presented by its proponents as "an evidence-based scientific theory about life's origins". Proponents claim that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." ID is a form of creationism that lacks empirical support and offers no testable or tenable hypotheses, so it is not science.

That is amusing, because that is exactly the argument we make against evolution. When two related species share a trait, it is proof of evolution. When they don't share a trait, it is also proof of evolution. Or when two unrelated species share a trait. Or also when they don't. Because all evidence is interpreted as proof of evolution, no matter what it is, the field effectively offers no testable hypotheses, therefore it is also not a science.