Modern creationists have a tendency to avoid direct reference to religion, and the Bible in particular. The concept of "Intelligent Design Theory" is in the ascendant, as it can potentially be presented as a nonreligious theory of supernatural creation. Few people are gullible enough to be fooled by this, as it is patently obvious that it is just good ol' Biblical Creationism in sheep's clothing. The people pushing it, however, know that it can used as a means of getting religion into the science classroom, preferably in place of real scientific theories about evolution and cosmology, but failing that, at least it might be given "equal time" in a democratic fashion, so that students may make up their own minds. This appeal to "fairness" is what they hope to use to get such nonsense on an equal footing with mainstream (read "real") science.

The (some would say sneaky and underhanded) intention appears to be to produce an apparently scientific version of Creation that can be introduced into science classrooms, and also indicate to students that science is not only compatible with, but actually positively supports, the doctrines of Creationism as well as their own personal beliefs. Religious parents groups can then pressure schools into teaching a more "balanced" version of biological and cosmological origins, and religious students can raise questions as to why they are not hearing the alternative science of Intelligent Design.

Examples that have been used to demonstrate apparent design include:

• The "irreducible" complexity of the human eye (the fact that Darwin dealt with this in The Origin Of Species, and did not consider it a problem, is usually overlooked. Strange.)
• The "irreducible" complexity of various proteins and molecules, e.g. haemoglobin (as used by Michael Behe, see "Further Reading" below)
• The apparent "fine tuning" of the universe to allow humans to exist (also known as the "Anthropic Principle"- we can observe the universe, therefore it exists for our benefit).

The idea is pretty straightforward - find anything in nature that can be described as so unlikely as to be almost impossible, or so complex that it "could not possibly" have come into being without a guiding hand, and you have the basis for "intelligent design" - the only explanation is that a supernatural, super-intelligent entity guided the creation of the universe and all living things. If the student is of a religious mindset, this all makes a good deal of sense and will be extremely appealing, and it is clearly a short step from "supernatural designer" to "God", and the God of Christianity in particular.

Therein lies the flaw, unfortunately.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that a number of things are discovered which cannot possibly be explained by any known science. Surely strong evidence that the Bible is correct, and we should all instantly bow down and worship Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Saviour? No such luck - let's examine the problems. It assumes that science will never be able to satisfactorily explain the phenomena. Theists like to say things like "It is unreasonable to say there is no god without first having infinite knowledge" (along the same lines as denying the existence of pink unicorns without first having examined every cubic inch of the universe). This can obviously be turned around, into "It is unreasonable to say that science will never solve this, without first having infinite knowledge of science." Basically the theist is saying that we should just accept that "God did it" and think no further on the matter. Scientists, on the other hand, would rather say "We don't know - let's try to find out." Unexplained is not the same as inexplicable, although creationists would prefer us to believe otherwise. ID is one last desperate attempt to find a God Of The Gaps, before science closes that final gap.

Let's take the assumptions one step further now, and for the sake of argument assume that science can never explain how the universe came to be, and some sort of powerful supernatural (or at least, unknown) involvement is necessary.

1. Who is to say that the Creator is still around? Valid possibilities include:
• The Creator created the universe, and then simply left it alone. He neither knows nor cares about any life in it (this is a form of Deism).
• The Creator ceased to exist at the moment of creation. He converted himself into the physical universe, and effectively died at that instant.
• He died of boredom waiting for anything interesting to happen.
2. Why just one Creator? Why not two, or a dozen, or a million? If you are going to invoke the supernatural, then the idea that there is an individual creator for each and every sub-atomic particle is just as plausible as there being one big one that made everything. Many religions have numerous gods, each being responsible for a different part of the universe. What makes a single creator a better explanation than multiple creators? It is also possible that one Creator made the universe, which was then taken over by another omnipotent critter - a caretaker deity.
3. It is an unjustified leap to assert that there was a single creator, and that creator must therefore be God as described in the Bible. Again, the creation stories of every other religion, extinct or extant, are equally plausible in this context.
4. What reason is there to think that a Creator is even remotely interested in human beings, or any other specific form of life? There are, for instance, far more beetles and bacteria that humans, and they have also been around much longer. It could be that humans (and elephants and starfish) are a mere side-effect of a great beetle-breeding experiment!
5. What reason is there to suppose that life was intended to exist? Living things obviously do exist, but life could merely be an unintended or unimportant side-effect. It may be that a Creator was only interested in making stars, and everything else is just an emergent property caused by the way the universe is set up. Alternatively, the Creator could be some sort of hobbyist who creates universes, lets them run their course to see how they develop, and then starts again with a slightly different configuration. Humans, apart from being the most important part of Creation might merely be a tick on his checklist ("Experiment #1782638, life developed : Yes").
6. Should it be demonstrated that a Creator does exist, and is interested in us, it still does not follow that we are required to bow down and worship it. Would it even want us to? Why create the enormity of the universe merely to have a single solitary planet briefly inhabited by cringing sycophants?
7. Life existed on Earth for hundreds of millions of years before humans evolved, and the amount of time we have been around is utterly insignificant relative to the age of the universe. Were we to exist for a hundred million years ourselves, life will still go on afterwards without us, and the universe itself has many billions of years left in it. It seems bizarre (and considerably arrogant) to suggest that it is all here just for our benefit, or purely to ensure that humans came about.
8. If life has been "designed" from the start, that would suggest that there is some sort of guiding hand behind the processes that form life - evolution. However, evolution generally progresses by the bloody, violent and painful deaths of living things. Carnivores kill and eat herbivores, parasites inject their eggs into living creatures so that they can hatch out and eat the host alive from the inside, disease organisms inflict untold agony on many living things. Also, in order to ensure the eventual formation of specific creatures (e.g. humans), certain events had to happen - mass extinctions caused by meteor strikes, wiping out 90% of life, for example. Either not a good example of intelligent design, or the Designer just like inflicting asteroids, volcanoes, tidal waves and plagues on his dearly loved creations to ensure they evolved in the right direction. In short, the "designer" could not have found a more hideous way to go about creating life forms. Maybe he enjoys seeing pain and suffering? That would appear to be the case, judging from the evidence of life.
9. This brings us to the concept of a "Powerful Deceiver" - instead of this Creator being an all-powerful, kind, loving entity, what reason is there to think that it is not, in fact, an all-powerful, evil, hateful entity that sees life on Earth much as a child with a magnifying glass sees ants on a sunny day? Being all-powerful, it would be perfectly easy to convince people that he was benevolent, and being mere mortals there is no way we could tell otherwise (convincing ourselves that fires and earthquakes are all part of his mysterious, but no doubt good, Plan for us all). Certainly, judging by the historical (and present day) atrocities committed by followers of an alleged Creator, this is all too easy to suspect (and, of course, just as impossible to disprove as is the idea of a benevolent deity, and therefore no less valid).
10. It is even possible to postulate a more mundane Creator - an experimental physicist from a civilisation so advanced that even its most basic children's toy would appear miraculous to us, still in the infancy of science. Perhaps our entire universe was generated in an Acme Big Bang machine on her workbench, parameters carefully adjusted to allow for the formation of stars, planets and self-replicating molecules that may one day become alive. Contrived and far-fetched though this may sound, it is (again) equally as valid as anything dreamt up by the founders of any religion. It does though beg the question of the creation of our physicists own universe, but then so does the idea of a Creator beg the question "Who Created the Creator?"

These examples are not intended to show that a Creator cannot exist, but that ID theorists are quite unjustified in going from "We see design in the universe" to "The God of the Bible exists, and Christianity is the One True Religion" (or whichever God and religion they happen to believe in).

It should also be mentioned that the Intelligent Designer hypothesis has no explanatory power whatsoever. What does it solve? How does it help? The solution to an apparently (assuming, as they do, that it is forever beyond the ken of mere mortals) intractable problem is effectively this :

An unknown, unknowable entity
did it in an unknown manner
for unknown reasons.

Well, that's a biiiig leap forward in human knowledge and understanding of the universe, isn't it? Intelligent Design attempts to explain a mystery with an even greater mystery. Perhaps it would be more reasonable to simply say "We don't know, let's try to find out"...

In conclusion, in the unlikely event that Creationists (sorry, "Intelligent Design Theorists") ever come up with solid evidence of supernatural design, it would be no reason to adopt any of their religious assertions along with it. The point is, it is possible to just make up anything and assert that it can explain the unexplainable, supported only by lack of available science and lots of wishful thinking. The hypothesis of Intelligent Design not only attempts to explain everything and in doing so manages to explain nothing at all, but also raises more questions than it claims to solve, thus rendering itself worthless.

© Adrian Barnett 2000