Point and Counterpoint on ‘Intelligent Design’
Re “Not Intelligent, and Surely Not Science,” Commentary, March 30: The theory of evolution seems most probable when one asks the obvious question about the intelligent-design theory. As I understand the argument, things with complexity require a creator. For example, this computer I type on needed the people at Intel, Dell, etc., to bring it into existence. So it goes for the wondrous complexity in the nature here on Earth; it too requires a creator, God. Yet how terrifically complex God must be creating universes filled with galaxies, planets and life, so God too requires a creator. Who is this other creator, another god? And that other god, again complex, requires yet another god and so on to the requirement of infinite gods.
Evolution is much simpler to understand.
Kevin A. King
Torrance
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I agree with the general message of Michael Shermer’s piece and with all of his points except one, and I offer this criticism in the hope of helping him refine and strengthen his argument. When he says that intelligent design “offers nothing in the way of testable hypotheses,” I wonder if theoretical physics and cosmology -- which most experts would agree is science -- have always offered testable hypotheses. Are there not elements of string theory and subatomic physics, for example, that cannot be tested? Doesn’t cosmology make conjectures about the events of the Big Bang, and those which preceded it, that can never be tested?
Bruce Rhodewalt
La Quinta
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Intelligent-design advocates have much to answer for. They are retarding the spirit of scientific inquiry among our youth. Meanwhile, China and India take our kids to the cleaners every year in the scientific literacy rankings.
Scientific progress is made by investigating the unknown, not shrugging it off and saying, “God did it!” When a scientist (or a student) encounters anomalies, contradictions or the unexplained, they must take it as a challenge, not as a stop sign.
Science and religion coexist because people have a right to their religious beliefs, not because religious truths can be proved by empirical science. Intelligent-design proponents also do a disservice to religion, by trying to make it jump through empirical hoops. In the long run, they can only erode religious faith.
Robert Platt
New York
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Michael Shermer, America’s skeptic in chief, is at it again. He is against “drawing inferences” about a designer because it doesn’t “seem to be the function of science.” Shermer wants to limit scientific inquiry to the purely natural, which perforce rules out any design possibilities. That’s like saying, “Let’s discuss a proper diet, but don’t say anything about vegetables. That’s ruled out.”
Why not try something novel, like letting science be about the truth, wherever it leads? If we find Darwinism to be so lacking as to be preposterous as a working hypothesis, and biological life so complex that it appears to be designed, why must we shut down the brain? It is Shermer’s approach that is “not intelligent.”
James S. Bell
Woodland Hills
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Shermer has hit on something that can perhaps defuse the fuss over the status of the intelligent-design theory as an alternative to Darwinian evolutionary theory. As Shermer rightly notes, the assumption of intelligence design does not advance our knowledge of natural processes. No conclusions follow from it that would change the way even evolution-based science is done. There is nothing to be tested. But, by the same token, this also means that, in an effort at comity, the Darwinian could say to the IDT proponent that evolution, as Darwin envisioned it, is the “design” that is to be found in nature. While the IDT proponent and the Darwinian may disagree as to whether a transcendent source -- e.g. God -- of “design” exists, they could agree that the mechanism of natural design is pretty much what Darwin said it was.
Ivan Strenski
Prof. of Religious Studies
UC Riverside
