Question In relation to the debate raging in the US about evolution and Intelligent Design, I would like to know whether positing the existence and prior activity of an intelligent designer is a scientific or a philosophical question. Is it scientifically conceivable that the existence of a designer and of things having come about purposefully as opposed to randomly could ever be deduced from available or putative evidence?

Accepted:
December 21, 2005

Comments

Surely there could be evidence for this kind of claim. Maybe we'd find when we went to Mars that there were some super-smart aliens working on the creation of life, and then we'd find when we returned evidence to back up their story that they'd done the same thing here. But, at the moment, there doesn't seem to be any prospect of such evidence.

But, as the judge in Pennsylvania clearly recognized, Intelligent Design isn't really a scientific hypothesis. It's a religious doctrine. That, to my mind, isn't a bad thing. What's unfortunate is that so many people on both sides of this debate seem to think science and religion are fundamentally opposed.

Right, the judge did argue that ID wasn't science. But one of his grounds was that there couldn't be evidence for it. So I wonder whether Richard's first paragraph in fact ought to make one pause about at least one of the judge's arguments.

Perhaps one way of addressing your question would be to say that the hypothesis about a designer is -- if you insist -- scientific. But if so, it's a lousy scientific hypothesis (like astrology, alchemy, parapsychology, etc.): vague, hard to test, in so far as it can be tested it hasn't been confirmed, and there's a deep, highly confirmed, more parsimonious account that's available as an alternative. Given all this, the insistence on teaching ID in the science classroom must be explained in terms of the School Board's religious motivations. And that's something that we should take to be ruled out by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. (The justice in Pennsylvania also ruled in favor of the Plaintiffs on the grounds that the motivation behind injecting ID into the curriculum was entirely religious -- in spite of, as the justice observed, blatant self-perjuring on the part of the Defendants.)

It's not going to be possible to deduce intelligent design from scientific evidence, but no scientific theory can be deduced from evidence, only more or less supported by it. And I agree with Richard that there could in principle be good evidence for the existence of an an intelligent designer. Of course we have such evidence all the time for the human case. For example, archeologists working on a dig have to decide whether a given object is likely to be a natural product or a human artifact, and they often have excellent evidence for the latter hypothesis, i.e. for intelligent (human) design.

But an inference to a non-human and perhaps divine designer seems crucially different in a number of respects. First of all, we have loads of independent evidence for the existence of human intelligent designers, but not for extra-terrestial or divine designers. Second, there really is no other remotely plausible explanation for the existence of say a finely wrought neclace than intelligent design, whereas the case the natural and non-intelligent processes cannot possibly explain the existence of living organisms is very far from made. Third, for those who do not already have religious commitments to the existence of God, the antecedent probability of the existence of such a being seems extraordinarily low, which would require correspondingly extraordinarily strong evidence to overcome, evidence nobody has come anywhere near providing. And to factor in religious considerations in order to assign the existence of God a higher prior probability would I think mean that the investigation would no longer be science.

If I may add one additional point to the ones already given: there is an all important difference between an intelligent designer that is a human being or an advanced alien civilisation, and an intelligent designer that is divine. The former could have evidence in its favour, and could be the object of scientific enquiry at least in principle. (We could in principle meet the aliens and ask them 'why did you make tigers?') The latter could not. The reason is contained in some of the arguments that Hume and Kant put forth against the classic arguments for the existence of a God. Namely, that the act of a divine being upon nature (a miracle) could not provide evidence for the being's divinity.