Dover Case Questions

[Ed Brayton]

Perry Dane wrote:

>         That said, though, one needs to be fair here.  The claim of 
> intelligent design theory is not that NO features of the biological 
> world can be explained by evolution through natural selection.  Nor is 
> it, as I said before, that the biological world is, according to one 
> or another criterion, well-designed.  It is, rather, that there are 
> certain features of the biological world (irreducible complexity and 
> all that) that point to at least those features having been designed 
> by an intelligence.


Actually, this depends on which ID advocate you're talking to at the 
time and that fact points up the lack of a coherent ID model. Some ID 
proponents, like Nancy Pearcey and Paul Nelson, are young earth 
creationists. For all practical purposes, they do take the position that 
there is nothing in the biological world, save perhaps bacterial 
adaptation for immunity to antibiotics, that can be explained by 
evolution through natural selection. That's precisely why there can't be 
an actual ID model for the natural history of life on earth, as there is 
for evolutionary theory. Does ID mean that all life forms in the earth's 
history were created simultaneously? Maybe. According to many ID 
advocates, yes. Does it mean that life on earth evolved through common 
ancestry but with the designer having to step in every now and then to 
design some particularly complex bit that can't evolve on its own? That 
appears to be Behe's position, at least.

But those are radically different propositions, and the inclusion of 
both of them under a sort of "mimimalist" or "bare bones" ID assertion 
that *some* designer did *something* at *some point* is one major reason 
why ID cannot be considered a scientific theory, because it does not 
make any positive statements that the evidence might either confirm or 
refute. At least with the young earthers, they have offered a model from 
which we can derive testable hypotheses - the world is ~6000 years old, 
all animals lived on the earth simultaneously, most of them were killed 
off in a global flood around 4500 years ago, all of the features of the 
geological world are the result of that flood, and so forth. Those are 
all statements that lead to risky predictions that the evidence may 
either confirm or refute (in this case, all of them are of course 
soundly refuted by the evidence). So frankly, I don't think we can make 
statements about what "intelligent design theory" says or doesn't say 
about evolution or about natural history because there is no theory, 
just a very vague and minimalist statement and a set of arguments 
against evolution.

Ed Brayton