The ID Movement

At this point this is a very rough and unfinished draft, but I appreciate anyone's thoughts...

What bothers me about intelligent design is not the theory itself but my perception of the culture that surrounds it. Specifically, intelligent design seems to be more a visceral and non-scientific rejection of evolutionary biology that a free-standing scientific theory. I think no one will deny that the ID movement began in response to the theory of evolution, and I would argue that without evolution to react against, the dishonesty of intelligent design as a "scientific" movement becomes apparent.

To makes this point, I would ask that you first consider the simplest possible intelligent design theory, which is the statement "An intelligent force had a hand in the development of life on earth." I claim that this position is not inherently in conflict with the theory of evolution as a theory intelligent design need not constraints on the methods or timeline employed by the creative force. ID proponents rarely speculate on these issues (the aspect of their culture which is most suspicious) but it is not difficult to imagine our creator using coincidence and evolution as his creative tools.

For example, perhaps millions of years ago the creator came to the young earth, dumped out some organic goo and zapped it with some lasers and electricity. Any intelligent designer would likely have an intellect and an understanding of biochemistry vastly in excess of ours, and could set initial conditions to guarantee development of complex life; from a carefully chosen starting point, the chance mutations that produce evolution might be statistical certainties to a more sophisticated intelligence. Taking a step even further back, the creator of the universe might have chosen its laws knowing they would allow the formation of life on Earth. Such a creator would only have to make the universe sufficiently large to make our occurrence a near certainty.

I would like you to consider the question: If ID and evolution are reconciled, what is left of ID as a scientific theory? It is with this question in mind that I ask you forgive my simplification of ID given above, which ignores the many arguments ID proponents give against the theory of evolution. I did so because I believe the answer to my question above is "Very Little" and that the proponents of ID themselves are not interested in what remains.

An important aspect of scientific culture is curiousity; if you solve a problem, you ask new questions and try to solve them. If we accept intelligent design as a scientific theory, there are a number of new questions that any curious person would ask. For example: Who is the intelligent designer? What methods did they use? What can we infer about them based on their creations? For what purpose did they create us? Who created them? How do we avoid an infinite regression of creators? My opinion is that in mainstream scientific culture, people would have begun to broach these questions 10-15 years ago, and it is telling that the ID community has not touched them.