Posted on May 4, 2006

How to Dismiss Intelligent Design

Christopher Hitchens once said, when speaking of religion, “That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” This simple statement gives us all we need to safely ignore the silliness of intelligent design.

Whether one thinks it is good evidence or bad, one cannot deny that there is evidence for evolution. We’ve found the mechanisms by which it occurs, we’ve seen it in action, and we’ve traced its effects through the historical record. The gaping holes the creationists claim the theory is riddled with don’t, in fact, exist–but let’s assume for the sake of argument that they are massive, indeed. Those gaps in the knowledge do not negate the evidence. Instead, they tell us that we need to seek out more and, if we can’t find any, reevaluate that which we’ve already unearthed. But the evidence is still there.

Intelligent design, on the other hand, is a theory without evidence. “What about the irreducible complexity of the eye?” you say. “Surely that is evidence of a designer.” Ignoring the fact that the eye isn’t irreducibly complex, responding to such a claim is as easy as retorting, “Okay, but what’s your evidence for a designer?”

There just isn’t any. This is why intelligent design doesn’t belong in a science classroom or natural history museum. Let’s say you’re talking to a creationist and he tells you he has lots of evidence for his theory. What evidence could that be? In point of fact, what he means by evidence is wholly contained in finding phenomena in nature we can’t currently explain. If we can’t explain it, then it can’t be explained by our existing theories–a tautology, but an important one to the creationist. For his line of reasoning leads him to see any unexplainable characteristic as evidence for a creator.

This should immediately strike you as odd. After all, human history is bursting with questions people at the time didn’t have answers for–questions that were latter addressed quite easily by advancements in knowledge. To accept the unexplained as hard evidence for a proposition about the nature of the physical world–and God the Creator is surely a claim of such kind–is to believe that there is something unique about our current time. Namely, that we have answered every question the best we will ever be able to.

Thus, to accept intelligent design is to condemn mankind in the future to our present state of relative ignorance.