withallyourmind.net

One thing that is often alleged about Intelligent Design is that it uses a fallacious god-of-the-gaps argument, inserting God’s activity into the few remaining gaps in our scientific knowledge as a desperate attempt to leave a place for Him in a world in which scientists and others are hopeful that everything can be explained in strictly naturalistic terms, with more progress seemingly being made towards this goal everyday.

The problem with this characterization is that it is a serious misrepresentation of ID arguments (as are most criticisms of ID) for at least two major reasons.

The first is that ID arguments that make use of certain explanatory gaps don’t focus on issues for which we know little about and for which we have yet to find naturalistic explanations. Rather, they focus on issues that we know plenty about, and for which ID advocates believe there can, in principle, be no naturalistic explanation. As I understand them, arguments from the origin of the universe and the origin of life are like this. These are not cases of someone saying “Hmm…this is an area which we have little knowledge about and for which we have yet to find a naturalistic explanation…let’s just assume God did it.” Rather, they are cases of intelligent people saying “Let’s think about this…Given the latest scientific research and sound reasoning about this, I believe that the only reasonable explanation for the phenomenon is the activity of a supernatural being for these reasons…” and then they give reasons. If there’s an argument to be made, it’s going to have to be about the evidence.

Secondly, many of the arguments for intelligent design don’t require any sort of gaps in the laws of nature at all. Del Ratzsch, a professional philosopher of science, makes this point well (although he uses a similar but slightly less fantastical example). Suppose a swarm of meteors hits the moon and after the dust settles, it is discovered that the impacts had left thousands of small, uniformly sized meteor craters arranged so that they spelled out in binary code “Look here” and then “they constituted a really nifty proof for a previously unknown mathematical theorem that held the key to solving a bunch of global problems. Few would doubt that this episode exhibited design.” But, he goes on to explain, suppose a time machine were used to go back and retrace the history of each and every meteor all the way back to the big bang and it were discovered that everything that happened was completely natural and the path of each meteor was explanable in strictly scientific terminology. “We would not,” he says, “abandon our previous design conclusion - we would simply conclude that the design had been deliberately into the initiating event of the cosmos itself.” You see, the concept of a gap doesn’t even apply here, because gaps have to do with the causal history of a phenomenon whereas design has to do with whether it has certain characteristics that we invariably associate with the guidance of an intelligent agent.