Many major publications have written about intelligent design. This has been a problem for scientists because it gives credibility where none exists. The people who support intelligent design have been able to do a good job of public relations, but have not presented any scientific evidence to support their stand.
The main thrust of intelligent design is to attack evolution by claiming there are gaps in the theory, and that life processes are too complicated to have been formed by the evolutionary process.
There seems to be no testable definition of intelligent design or the designer. Without a definition there is no place to start to do research. Anyone who is proposing a new scientific theory needs to provide a scientifically testable definition and hypotheses with evidence that supports it.
There is an accepted definition of evolution. Evolution is a change in the gene pool of a population of living things over time. There is also an acceptable definition for science; The observation, identification, description, and experimental investigation of natural processes. The definition for the scientific method is generally taken to include rules for concept formation, conduct for observation and experiments, and validation of hypotheses by observation or experiment. Furthermore, scientists share and collect data, and collectively come up with "theories."
If the supporters of intelligent design are to follow, these definitions there are basic questions that they still have not answered.
And most important, what is the consensus from other fields of scientific research. Evolution is supported by divergent scientific disciplines such as geography, paleontology, genetics, biological distribution, anatomy, biochemistry, and many others.
Intelligent design supporters speak of a few scientists who support them. This is meaningless.
Science is determined by theories supported by observation and experimental evidence. The scientist, even someone like Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton, is not important in determining what science is. Authority and tradition mean nothing. Only evidence obtained through the scientific method can be counted on, because it can be verified by others. How would a scientist verify intelligent design or the intelligent designer? So far they have not presented experimental evidence to support irreducible complexity. We must question, why not?
Intelligent design would have us change the way science is done. We would be discarding the most valuable scientific tool known, the scientific method.
What they are proposing is backwards from the way scientific research is done. They would degrade all science in three major backward steps;
1. Intelligent design supporters want science taught differently in high schools than in college and universities. They are pushing to have it taught in public high schools. That is backwards. Colleges and universities do the investigation in research that has been done and text books are written by people associated with this research. To let school boards that control high schools, and juniors high schools, or school teachers, set the standards for science is unthinkable.
2. They want scientific theories based on supernatural rather than on the scientific method. It took years for science to work out the best ways to do scientific research and how to verify that research to escape the superstitions of the past. Intelligent design would have chemistry, physics, astronomy, geology and biology introduce the unknown into scientific research. No longer would testable experimentation be required. It would just have to look like there was a designer. They say that "Intelligent Design is simply the science of design detection." Therefore, someone must decide, without a testable hypotheses, what was designed and how often the designer interceded in the process. This can hardly be called science.
3. The leaders of the intelligent design movement claim that they do not have to prove that there is an intelligent designer. Instead they say it is up to the scientists to prove that there is no irreducible complexity or gap. This is scientifically backwards. Any scientific theory must stand on its own evidence. One theory cannot be proved by attacking another. That is one of the fundamental laws of science. Any high school student should know that. The Discovery institute issues a set of questions attacking evolution for high school students to ask their teachers. Why would this be necessary if there were evidence to support intelligent design?
If we accept the three basic changes in the way science is done, it would change the way science is taught in all scientific disciplines. There are gaps and complicated process in knowledge in physics, chemistry, geology, genetics, astronomy and biology. If there were none, it would mean that we know everything and all research could stop.
Every major scientist has made mistakes, usually due to lack of evidence not known to them.
Newton thought that God nudged the planets every once in a while to keep them in proper orbit, Darwin had no knowledge of DNA, Einstein did not know about dark matter. The point is that science is self correcting, but only because of the way it is done. Intelligent design would have us change that.
