As God part of "intelligent design"?

Eighty years after the famous Scopes "Monkey" Trial, the anti-evolution forces have regrouped. Today, the battle in school districts from Kansas to Pennsylvania is over the teaching of "intelligent design," the view that life is so complex it must be the product of a higher intelligence.

Advocates of intelligent design try to portray themselves as a modern-day Scopes, victims of a dogmatic pro-evolution establishment that will not allow their scientific view into the schools. The central issue, however, is whether intelligent design is, in fact, a genuine scientific theory or merely a disguised form of religious advocacy, creationism in camouflage, maintains Keith Lockitch, junior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute, Irvine, Calif.

Proponents of intelligent design aggressively market their viewpoint as real science, insisting it is not religiously based. Writes one leading advocate, Michael Behe: "The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself--not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs."

Intelligent design adherents claim that Darwinian evolution is a fundamentally flawed theory--that there are certain complex features of living organisms evolution simply cannot explain. Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they claim, because it does not require that the intelligent designer be God. "Design," writes another leading proponent, William Dembski, "requires neither magic nor miracles nor a creator."

"Inferences to design," contends Behe, "do not require that we have a candidate for the role of designer." According to its advocates, the designer responsible for intelligent design in biology could be any sort of creative intelligence capable of engineering the basic elements of life.

By the very nature of its approach, intelligent design cannot be satisfied with a designer who is part of the natural world, argues Lockitch. Such a designer would not answer the basic question its advocates raise: it would not explain biological complexity as such. The only designer that would stop their quest for a design explanation of complexity is a designer about whom one cannot ask any questions or be subjected to any type of scientific study--something that transcends nature and its laws.

Concludes Lockitch: The supposedly nonreligious theory of intelligent design is nothing more than a crusade to peddle religion by giving it the veneer of science--to pretend, as one commentator put it, that "faith in God is something that holds up under the microscope."

COPYRIGHT 2005 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group