IS INTELLIGENT DESIGN (ID) IN OPPOSITION TO SCIENCE?

According to Wikipedia, ID is in opposition to science:

• Intelligent design, by appealing to a supernatural agent, directly conflicts with the principles of science, which limit its inquiries to empirical, observable and ultimately testable data and which require explanations to be based on empirical evidence.

However, all scientists, IDers included, do science the same way, using the same methods. All observe, measure, quantify, and replicate findings. There is only one difference between IDers and non-IDers. Non-IDers (naturalists) insist that only natural explanations are allowable.

Instead, the debate between naturalism and ID is largely a philosophical one. It asks these questions:

• “What underlies the objective scientific laws/forces and the resultant findings? Do these laws originate, operate, and continue immutably either naturally or supernaturally (ID)? What is the ultimate source of causation and being?”

The findings of science are made possible by the laws of science, which need to be universal and immutable if science is going to teach us anything. (They also must be elegant so that we can know them.) How then do we best explain the origin and maintenance of these laws or necessary preconditions for doing science? Were these immutable and universal laws the product of a Big Bang (naturalism) or of ID?

Because this question is prescientific, it must be answered primarily philosophically. As such, ID is no less scientific than naturalism, neither of which can be directly observed or measured. However, there are many considerations that argue persuasively for ID:

·       There is absolutely no evidence that anything has ever occurred naturally (without intelligence – ID). If naturalism cannot account for even one thing, how then can it account for everything?

·       It is not enough for naturalism to offer an explanation for their origins. It must also explain how they remain immutable in a universe of molecules-in-motion. In other words, there is nothing else immutable that can account for the laws remaining immutable.

·       Naturalism would also have to explain how they operate universally in light of the fact that all other causal sources operate locally with a diminished impact the further away an object is from them, like a diminishing signal while riding away from a radio station. However, what arises from a Big Bang is local and remains localized, albeit expanding.

·       A Big Bang is incapable of producing elegant, universal, and immutable laws.

·       Naturalism cannot explain the origin of the initial singularity and what caused the explosion. Necessarily, naturalism falls prey to the problem of infinite regress.

·       Nor is naturalism an elegant theory. It must resort to various explanations to explain such artifacts of design such as freewill, consciousness, life, DNA, the cell, and even the Big Bang before there were any natural laws to explain or control it. However, ID requires only one leap-of-faith.

·       It cannot explain the fine-tuning of the universe without invoking an infinite number of universes (the multiverse). However, the multiverse would require an infinite amount of space and time, both logical impossibilities.

·       It cannot account for the almost endless appearances of design.

Meanwhile, ID can elegantly account for all of these phenomena.

In fact, some naturalists have forsaken their naturalistic understanding of the universe for partially scientific reasons. The now-deceased Antony Flew has been called the “foremost atheist thinker of the 20th century.” However, after 40 years of debating Christians, he surprised the world.

At a 2004 debate at New York University, Flew declared that he “now accepted the existence of a God” (Antony Flew with Roy Varghese, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, p. 74). In that debate, he said that he believed that the origin of life points to a creative Intelligence:

• Almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which are needed to produce (life), that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together. It’s the enormous complexity of the number of elements and the enormous subtlety of the ways they work together. The meeting of these two parts at the right time by chance is simply minute. It is all a matter of the enormous complexity by which the results were achieved, which looked to me like the work of intelligence.” (75).

 Did Flew have a religious experience that had biased him against a naturalistic explanation? He explained:

• I must stress that my discovery of the Divine has proceeded on a purely natural level, without any reference to supernatural phenomena. It has been an exercise in what has traditionally been called natural theology. It has had no connection with any of the revealed religions. Nor do I claim to have had any personal experience of God or any experience that may be called supernatural or miraculous. In short, my discovery of the Divine has been a pilgrimage of reason and not of faith. (93).