Is Intelligent Design Used Today?

In our last post I briefly mentioned the concept of consistency. Today I want to look at examples of Intelligent Design being not only used, but widely accepted in a wide variety of disciplines in today’s world. As we take this quick journey I hope you can quickly see that opponents of Intelligent Design are …….

The concepts behind Intelligent Design are used today in many different disciplines of science. In fact, many different fields of science would not be able to function or even exist without some form of acceptance of Intelligent Design.

For example, a Crime Scene Investigator uses Intelligent Design when he approaches a crime scene and has to determine whether a person died as an accident or the result of foul play.

If an Archeologist finds a weird shaped rock he must determine if it is the result of abnormal weathering or if it was chipped that way by a pre-historic hunter.

A Military Cryptographer must decide if a piece of paper handed to him with jumbled letters is just a random sequence or the enemy’s secret code. All three of these disciplines use precepts, such as specified complexity, found in Intelligent Design.

Naturalists claim that we must have solid natural explanations to work with. Eugenie Scott in her essay entitled The Nature of Change (Click Here to read the article), wrote “…but even if we didn’t [have solid explanations to work with], science only has tools for explaining things in terms of natural causation.”

Again we are faced with an incompatible situation. Scott is claiming that science can only explain things in terms of natural causation. This is true if, and only if, the person establishing scientific guidelines decides to incorporate it. In and of itself there is no reason natural causation has to be a criterion. In fact, it seems quite suspicious that it would be there in the first place. The only logical reason would be to ensure that it could exclude any theory that relies on something that mere human reasoning cannot explain. Again we are faced with the scientific community not actually being interested in the truth, but what fits with their agenda.

Another point to consider is that if Intelligent Design is well received in certain scientific fields but not others, serious problems begin to arise. As seekers of truth and academic integrity we must begin to ask questions about this. For example, how can we trust the Archeologist or Crime Scene Investigator if the objective methods used are only true for his field and not others? Wouldn’t truth be truth regardless as otherwise it would be relative?

Phillip Johnson raises a great question when he asks “If design is a legitimate subject for scientific investigation in the case of computers, communications from space aliens, and peculiar markings on cave walls, why should it be arbitrarily excluded from consideration when dealing with the biological cell or the conscious mind?” We must hold those in the scientific community accountable for hypocritical practices.

I hope you can see that those opposed to Intelligent Design theory really aren’t opposed to the theory in any field whatsoever, except biology. When one becomes opposed to a theory based on personal preferences instead of pursuit of truth regardless of where it leads, we no longer have science, we have chaos.