Intelligent Design Is Not Science

My Argument is that Intelligent Design is not science, and so shouldn't be given the same treatment as science, i.e. shouldn't be taught as a scientific theory, shouldn't be debated in scientific journals or given scientific research grants by the government etc... For my position, I will put forward 2 arguments: 1) Intelligent Design is wrong; there is no reason to believe that the theory of ID has any weight, and as such should be discarded along with Lamarckian evolution and geocentricism. 2 )Intelligent Design isn't even wrong; various tenets of ID are characteristically unscientific in their implications. Science is here defined as the method of investigating empirical phenomenon, forming a hypothesis as to how that phenomenon can be explained by scientific laws, then making a generalization as to how this hypothesis relates to phenomena of a similar kind, also known as a scientific theory. This theory is modified or corroborated by new evidence, and as such the best theories are kept whilst the unsuccessful are junked. Hence, the theory of gravity explains the interaction of different forms of matter based on their properties, i.e. mass, trajectory etc... which have been adduced by the scientific laws that operate, (Such as, if I drop an apple it will fall to the ground). Because of these criteria, the statements that scientists make are extremely well supported, as they constantly reevaluate and seek to dispute them. Thus, for a theory to be scientific, it must have supporting evidence, must be open to disproof, (Falsifiable), and must be at base empirical, (Hence the fact that science has a methodologically naturalistic bias). Onto the arguments: 1) There is no evidence for Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design is, according to the Discovery Institute: "The theory that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." (http://www.discovery.org...) Intelligent Design is unlike other forms of popular creationism, in that it doesn't attack the evidence put forward for evolution, such as the fossil record, but puts forth positive claims relating to the inability for certain features, mostly microbiological, to have evolved. However, none of the arguments put forth by ID advocates make it likely that ID is true. I will survey the 2 most well-known, Specified Complexity, and Irreducible Complexity. -Specified Complexity. Mathematician William Dembski has put forth an argument for a designer, based on a "design filter", which is ordered thus: 1) If a phenomena is likely to occur, attribute it to regularity (Physical laws), otherwise proceed to (2). 2) If a phenomena is unspecified, then attribute it to chance, otherwise attribute it to design. To say that something is specified means that it conforms to a pattern that is "objectively given and not just imposed on events after the fact" (http://www.evcforum.net...). However, Dembski doesn't show how such a difference is made apparent. He states that an unspecified event could be a bull's-eye being painted onto a wall where an arrow lands, making it seem as if an archer purposefully shot it there. However, we cannot tell that this hasn't happened in the past with relation to living organisms. The theory of evolution states that animals flourish and languish, and because of this the animals that happen to evolve beneficial attributes survive and pass on their genes while the others don't. This would be analogous to a blind archer shooting arrows at a target in a patch of long grass; the arrows that don't hit the target are hidden in the grass while the arrows that hit the target can be seen by onlookers. Now suppose that some of the arrows have "mutated" feathers, these arrows can travel larger distances and so are more likely to hit the target. To the onlookers it would seem as if the archer has "picked" these feathered arrows and shot them at the target, even though the archer is (Unbeknownst to them) blind. In fact, we have evidence of this: the fossil record. This seems to make ID less likely than evolution, as there is evidence that the phenomena are unspecified, and that we impose patterns onto them. -Irreducible Complexity. Michael Behe's argument that certain structures, such as the flagellum or the blood-clotting cascade, could not function without all their parts interacting, and so couldn't have evolved gradually. Behe's argument is basically this: (P1) Direct, gradual evolution proceeds only by stepwise addition of parts. (P2) By definition, an irreducibly complex system lacking a part is nonfunctional. (C) Therefore, all possible direct gradual evolutionary precursors to an irreducibly complex system must be nonfunctional. (http://www.talkorigins.org...) However, there are various objections to this argument. Firstly, mutations needn't be additive, but can also be reductive; mutations can involve the removal of parts, meaning that parts can be taken away, making other parts of the structure necessary. For instance, a stone bridge is irreducibly complex, in that taking away any part would cause it to fall apart . However, it can be produced naturally by erosion of the centre by a stream or lake (http://www.a-taste-of-france.com...). Secondly, the function of certain parts can change with the addition of new parts. For instance, the flagellum has been shown to be reducible; if forty of its parts are taken away, the remaining parts form the type III secretory system, which has a different function but is nonetheless a functioning structure. (http://www.youtube.com...) 2) ID isn't scientific, for 2 reasons: - It isn't falsifiable. If there were no "Intelligently Designed" objects in the universe, this still wouldn't disprove the ID theory. But this is a weakness of the theory, as it shows that ID isn't empirical. It is thus like the theory of "intelligent falling", in that there is no way we can disprove this theory, whilst we can potentially disprove evolution by finding rabbits in the precambrian and so on. - It is vague as a theory. ID is vague because intelligence is an ambiguous term. Both arguments fallaciously assume that intelligence is anything that isn't the laws of nature or chance, but this is an argument from ignorance, and stops us looking for other naturalistic explanations. Dembski states that scientific bodies like SETI use the concept of intelligence in looking for other life forms, but researcher Seth Shostak has replied that SETI looks for instances of artificiality rather than intelligence. (http://en.wikipedia.org...) For these reasons, if there are no good arguments for the negation of my claim, Intelligent Design should be labeled as pseudoscientific and left ultimately to the philosophers and historians, as to do otherwise would go against the nature of scientific enquiry.