Does Intelligent Design Have Merit?

Does Intelligent Design Have Merit?

With about 70 billion stars and as many as 100 million life forms (at least here on Earth), the universe is a stunningly complex place. Did all of this matter evolve independently, or was it guided by a larger force – as proponents of intelligent design believe? With the debate raging in living rooms, classrooms and courtrooms, the stakes are high when it comes to determining intelligent design’s merit.

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Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

Intelligent Design is in Fact Religiously Based

Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

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Their viewpoint is not religiously based, they insist, 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." Indeed, "design" apparently requires surprisingly little of the "designer's" identity: "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. Some have even seriously nominated advanced space aliens for the role. Their premise seems to be that as long as they don't explicitly name the "designer"--as long as they allow that the "designer" could be a naturally existing being, a being accessible to scientific study--that this somehow saves their viewpoint from the charge of being inherently religious in character.

Imagine we discovered an alien on Mars with a penchant for bio-engineering. Could such a natural being fulfill the requirements of an "intelligent designer"?

It could not. Such a being would not actually account for the complexity that "design" proponents seek to explain. Any natural being capable of "designing" the complex features of earthly life would, on their premises, require its own "designer." If "design" can be inferred merely from observed complexity, then our purported Martian "designer" would be just another complex being in nature that supposedly cannot be explained without positing another "designer." One does not explain complexity by dreaming up a new complexity as its cause.

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"No" Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights
"No" National Center for Science Education
"No" AUSCS
"Yes" Discovery Institute
"Yes" Michael Behe
"Yes" Jay W Richards PhD
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  • Jay W Richards PhD
    Jay W. Richards is Research Fellow and Director of Acton Media at the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and theology (with... More

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