Michael Behe published an op-ed piece in The New York Times on Sunday. Others have attacked many of his claims, the claim that “intelligent design is not a religiously based idea” and the claim that “design” in nature is manifest evidence of a purposeful designer (the traditional “argument from design” that was plausible 150 years ago).
I want to focus on the fourth of his claims: “ in the absence of any convincing non-design explanation, we are justified in thinking that real intelligent design was involved in life.”
Behe's “argument” doesn't amount to much. This is all of it.
The strong appearance of design allows a disarmingly simple argument: if it looks, walks and quacks like a duck, then, absent compelling evidence to the contrary, we have warrant to conclude it's a duck. Design should not be overlooked simply because it's so obvious.
What he never tells us is how to recognize a duck.
A hundred years and twenty years ago we didn't have good evidence that the resemblance between relatives could be explained by physical/chemical constituents of the cell. Darwin had an idea, pangenesis, that he thought could explain it, but he didn't have good evidence for it, and it was discarded. Should we have concluded that the hereditary is a “design” that should just be accepted, not something that we should try to investigate? If we'd given up, we wouldn't know about chromosomes or DNA.
Intelligent design is the assertion that scientists should stop looking for explanations of some biological phenomena. It isn't a prescription for how to increase knowledge. It's a prescription for ensuring that we'll never get any smarter. It's an argument that because we can't imagine the solution to a difficult problem now, we'll never be able to imagine one in the future. Science is the search for answers, and intelligent design is an attempt to stop that search.
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