(Un)intelligent design
May 9th, 2008, 8:27 am · Post a Comment · posted by fsherman
Perhaps it’s unfair to judge Nancy Pearcey’s Thursday-night presentation on intelligent design by an article in the Daily News, but I’m going for it anyway:
•Will creationists/IDers ever get it through their heads that evolutionary theory is not “Darwinism?” I presume their choice of the word is to make it sound more like the religion they claim it is (comparable to Christianity or “Mohammedanism”) but the term makes no more sense than calling relativity “Einsteinism” or quantum mechanics “Bohrism.” Plus, of course, the theory we have today differs a lot from Darwin’s original concept, since Charles D. had no knowledge of genetics (if a creationist ever points out that many scientists don’t believe Darwin’s theories can explain all of life, that’s the reason—it would be several decades before even basic genetic theory became well known).
•Pearcey argues that since we can look at Mt. Rushmore and know for certain it’s the product of design, we can do the same with living things—in other words, if something looks like it’s been designed, it has been.
The flaw in this argument is that people see designs that don’t exist: Remember the claims that the image on Mars resembling a giant face was, in fact, a carved giant face? Or the countless times an image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary has appeared in some odd place? Either Pearcey believes every one of these examples is true, or we can’t spot design as well as she thinks.
For that matter, conspiracy theory is a form of design: People look at the supposedly random events of 9/11, for instance, and conclude that our government engineered the entire thing. Is Pearcey signing off on that theory?
Even if we stick to biology, Pearcey’s argument is disprovable. Biochemist Michael Behe listed several had-to-be-designed biological features in his book “Darwin’s Black Box.” Scientists subsequently found random, simple genetic shifts and mutations that could explain all of them.
