The Ayn Rand Institute devotes nearly all of its four opening statements to making an argument that essentially amounts to this: they believe the designer must be supernatural, and therefore intelligent design (ID) is not science but religion. They make three main arguments:
- (1) Design requires a designer, but a natural designer would require its own designer. Chains of designers are complex, and ID should be rejected because it requires a complex cause.
- (2) If ID doesn’t postulate a chain of designers, then the designer must be supernatural because it can’t be natural. This makes ID religion, not science.
- (3) ID Proponents have discussed their belief in God and the supernatural.
Nowhere does their writer refute the fact that ID’s methodology for detecting design (which I discuss in my first opening statement) is entirely empirical and scientific. In my subsequent rebuttals to The Ayn Rand Institute, I will show their three main arguments against ID are false and / or irrelevant for the following reasons:
(1) Problems with the first argument:
- This argument is false because ID doesn’t make claims about chains of designers because design detection can be made without investigating questions about the origin of the designer.
- Assuming their argument for a chain of designers (that may or may not lead back to a supernatural designer) is correct, this argument is at best a logical, philosophical argument about the larger implications of ID. This makes their argument against ID irrelevant because, as I explain in my third opening statement, larger philosophical implications do not disqualify a theory from being scientific.
- Their first argument is false because in historical sciences like ID, causes must be sufficient to explain the observed data. If those explanations are complex, so be it: historical sciences regularly invoke complex causes to account for the observed evidence. (Plate tectonics is a good example of a complex—and very correct and powerful—cause that was required to explain observations about the simple "fit" of the continents.)
- Their argument thus imposes an arbitrary rule that scientists can never detect design if the designer is complex—leading to preposterous outcomes in fields such as archaeology, code-breaking, environmental science, or the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Project.
(2) Problems with their second argument:
- Their second argument claims is false because ID doesn’t claim to affirm or reject a "chain of designers."
- This argument is also false because it imposes an arbitrary and preposterous rule that designers of "biological complexity" can never be natural. The fact that humans engage in genetic engineering refutes their arbitrary rule.
(3) Problems with their third argument:
- Their third argument is false because it is plain and obvious that biological complexity need not require a supernatural designer.
- This argument is also false because ID proponents have made it clear that while they may believe in God or the supernatural, that these are not mandatory conclusions of design detection within biology.
There is one problem that is common to all of The Ayn Rand’s Institute’s arguments: their entire argument is misplaced because ID
isn’t focused on studying the designer, but rather studies natural objects to detect design. Moreover, ID proponents have been very clear that their theory does not try to address religious questions about whether the designer is natural or supernatural.
The Ayn Rand Institute’s writer is the one obsessed with a supernatural designer, not the scientific theory of intelligent design. To elaborate, by focusing on the designer, The Ayn Rand Institute misrepresents ID: ID studies natural objects to determine if they bear the informational signatures that reliably indicate design by an intelligent cause. ID doesn't study designers. As I explained in my fourth opening statement, many critics of ID mistakenly believe that the theory of ID is focused on studying the designer, alleging that it specifically invokes supernatural forces or a deity. But ID is not focused on studying the actual intelligent cause responsible for life. Instead, ID studies objects in nature, attempting to determine if natural objects bear an informational signature indicating that an intelligent cause was involved in their origin. As William Dembski explains:
"Intelligent design is the science that studies signs of intelligence. Note that a sign is not the thing signified. … As a scientific research program, intelligent design investigates the effects of intelligence, not intelligence as such."(1)
Likewise Dembski explains that "intelligent design nowhere attempts to identify the intelligent cause responsible for the design in nature … design theorists recognize that the nature, moral character and purposes of this intelligence lie beyond the remit of science."(2)
If you want to stop reading my replies to The Ayn Rand Institute now, feel free: each of their opening statements say basically the same thing, and I’ve summarized my entire rebuttal. But I will reply in greater detail in my various rebuttals to The Ayn Rand Institute’s other separate opening statements.
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