Is Intelligent Design a Religious Movement?
This is part 3 of a short series examining the question, “Is Intelligent Design nothing more than disguised creationism?” In this post I will consider another assertion made by ID opponents who wish to equate ID with creationism.
A related criticism to the one considered in the last post is that ID is a religious movement, not a scientific one. Forrest argues that…
… intelligent design (is) a term that is essentially code for the religious belief in a supernatural creator…
and that…
… it represents an attempt to promote religious belief.
Much of my answer to the previous objection would be applicable to this criticism. Nonetheless, it might still be possible that intelligent design is a religious movement even if it does not espouse young earth creationism. I will make three further observations in response to this objection.
The initial observation, and perhaps the most important, is that intelligent design is based on science, and not on any religious text or teaching. Intelligent design scholars do not appeal to the Bible, nor do they start with any sacred text and look to nature for support. Intelligent design scientists attempt to empirically detect evidence of design in nature. The starting point is observations in nature. Arguing that intelligent design is not science, the American Astronomical Society claims that…
Intelligent Design fails to meet the basic definition of a scientific idea: its proponents do not present testable hypotheses and do not provide evidence for their views.
While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore just what counts as “science,” it is important to note that there is and has always been much disagreement among scientists and philosophers of science as to what is scientific and what is not. Del Ratzsch states that there is “no standard, accepted definition.” Intelligent design is at least as scientific as Darwinism unless one arbitrarily excludes intelligent agency from science. The dual concepts of irreducible complexity and complex specificity, along with the informational content present in the cell, are rigorously defined and are subject to empirical verification.
The next observation is that many special sciences employ the scientific methodology of intelligent design. For example, archaeologists assume that one can differentiate between artifacts of intelligent beings and the results of blind material forces. Similarly, the goal of forensic science is to determine whether someone’s death was caused by the actions of an intelligent agent or from natural causes – they assume that one is able to differentiate chance from design. Also, artificial intelligence, cryptography, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) assume that humans can recognize design. Scholars and educators assume the same in order to detect the actions of intelligent agents in fighting plagiarism and data falsification. The underlying scientific methodology of intelligent design is the same as that used by many other modern sciences.
In my next post, I will make a third observation concerning the assertion that ID is a religious movement and not a scientific one.
