Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design

by Peter Shikli
22 March 2002

Intelligent Design is an attempt by members of the scientific community to show the existence of God through natural laws. Most often, the battle is waged in the field of evolution where an Intelligent Design advocate points out a discrepancy that can only be explained by Intelligent Design, the direct hand of God instead of mindless evolution.

Intelligent Design seems to begin on the wrong foot by underestimating intelligence. Its advocates assume a supreme being who is only somewhat more intelligent than us. If she didn't want us to know her, would people with our intelligence be able to discover her fingerprints anyway? At the instant of the Big Bang, a really intelligent supreme being would have created a world with all the potential to become what it has without any tweaking.

All these miracles we ascribe to God seem at first to witness his power, but many of them imply his incompetence. The assertion that evolution cannot account for eyes, for example, is another way of saying God couldn't create a world where evolution could achieve God's goals without tweaking. God had to break his own rules to get the dang thing to work. That would be like Henry Ford designing a car that required him to come over now and then to crank it up to keep it going.

If we don't understand something, we shouldn't race to inject a fudge factor from God to explain it. She does better design work than that. Scientific discovery is a process that exercises the mind in critical thinking without short cuts to excuse our ignorance. We admit to how much we have yet to discover and proceed. The sooner we realize that the natural world will be explained by the laws of physics, the sooner we can continue the exercise to ask why we have laws of physics in the first place. That brings us to the search for meaning, rather than just the search for explanations. Then we have properly crossed from science to spirituality.

So, I do believe in Intelligent Design, including how intelligently designed evolution is.

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Peter Shikli is CEO of Bizware Online Applications. You can view his bio and contact him at pshikli@bizware.com.