Monday, May 28, 2007

Philosophers came up with ID a couple thousand years ago, and it's been revisited many, many times. I first heard of it many years ago under it's traditional name 'The Watchmaker Analogy'. In short:

You're walking out in the desert and you find a golden pocket watch with lots of little gears and everything inside and it keeps perfect time. 'Amazing!' you say. 'A pocket watch has randomly formed from the sand!'

This seems absurd. A reasonable person assumes there's a watchmaker who created it, because it's a really complicated thing and it would be stupid not to assume that it was created by an intelligent being.

So too is it with the universe.
This is a really good argument. That's right, ID is good. ID is a brilliant philosophical argument that we've been teaching in philosophy courses for hundreds of years. Because it's a most excellent argument for the existence of god.

But here's the thing: ID is a brilliant philosophical argument that we've been teaching in philosophy courses for hundreds of years. Do you see the words 'science' or 'scientific' in the previous sentence? No, because ID is a brilliant philosophical argument. Not science. No one for a second considered this science until very recently when the religious fanatics needed a new way to force their philosophical views into science classes. It hasn't changed. What makes something science hasn't changed. Only one thing has changed about it recently: politicians decided they needed to declare it science to push their own agenda.

That's not cool.

Science is science (thank you, Aristotle!) while philosophy is not (though it keeps spawning sciences).

* ID is not based on empirical evidence. (That the universe is complex?)
* ID doesn't give us any predictions about future observations. (If we continue to examine the universe, we'll continue to see that it's complex? We're going to find the designer if we look over in that star system?)
* ID is not falsifiable. ('Oh, we were mistaken: the universe actually isn't complex'?)

Actually, one thing has changed other than the politicians: science has shown that ID doesn't really apply to the main things we thought it did: life. Yeah, the universe is pretty complex, but we now have proof that there is a simple working mechanism by which complex things arrive from simple ones. Higher lifeforms don't need an intelligent creator. They just need lower lifeforms. And the lowest lifeforms are simple enough that they don't need a creator.

No comments: