If there's intelligent design, where did the designer come from?

The intelligent design argument (The ideas interview, G2, September 12) has been around for centuries and is no more valid now than when it was first proposed. St Anselm outlined a version in The Proslogion, almost 1,000 years ago. Evolution has taken place over billions of years and Michael Behe accepts that the evolution of complex organisms can arise from simple ones. Surely the same is possible at a molecular level. The search for a designer stems at an emotional level from a desire not to be alone and at an intellectual level from the inability to explain how something like the universe can come from nothing. Intelligent design offers us comfort only at the emotional level because at an intellectual level it fails to explain where the designer came from.

For centuries, scientists have endured persecution simply to be able to question established religious dogma. To see this dogma coming through the tradesman's entrance in new packaging is depressing. Intelligent design is the same hocus-pocus that leads people to believe in voodoo and that it is God's will that they should blow themselves up on a bus.
Adam Hamdy
Willoughbridge, Salop

Behe's views may be influenced by his Catholicism, but then Dawkins' thinking is influenced by his atheism. Similarly, Behe may be wrong - the Darwinists clearly think he is - but he and other scientists have a right to criticise Darwinism and suggest rational alternatives. Nor should Darwinists be allowed to confuse the debate by invoking the spectre of creationists defiling the education of the young, either in Kansas or Middlesbrough.

For too long, Darwinist ideologues have prevented diversity in biology by claiming that any alternative to their viewpoint must, by definition, be unscientific and that people like Behe are working to a creationist agenda.
Dr Milton Wainwright
University of Sheffield

Behe says his theory of the "irreducible complexity" of organisms proves the existence of a supernatural designer. This theory has been universally rejected by biologists because irreducible complexity can be produced by normal evolutionary processes. Behe, however, appears proud of his ostracism from the scientific community, drawing analogies with Galileo. It seems that everyone with a crackpot theory compares themselves to Galileo once their theory is criticised. But the fact that a theory receives a drubbing from the scientific community does not mean that it is correct.
Prof Jerry Coyne
University of Chicago, USA

John Sutherland describes intelligent design as "controversial", but his uncritical interview entirely fails to address this controversy. Behe's "theory" is at best an absence of new ideas and at worst a thinly veiled creationism.
Claire Postlethwaite and James O'Dwyer
Trinity College, University of Cambridge

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