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Frequently
Asked Questions about
Intelligent Design
Design theory-also called design or the design argument-is
the view that nature shows tangible signs of having been designed by
a preexisting intelligence. It has been around, in one form or another,
since the time of ancient Greece.
The most famous version of the intelligent design argument
can be found in the work of theologian William Paley, who in 1802 proposed
his "watchmaker" thesis. His reasoning went like this:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against
a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly
answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there
for ever. ... But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and
it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place;
I should hardly think the answer which I had before given [would be
sufficient].
To the contrary, the fine coordination of all its
parts would force us to conclude that
… the watch must have had a maker: that there must
have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer
or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually
to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
Paley argued that we can draw the same conclusion about
many natural objects, such as the eye. Just as a watch's parts are all
perfectly adapted for the purpose of telling time, the parts of an eye
are all perfectly adapted for the purpose of seeing. In each case, Paley
argued, we discern the marks of an intelligent designer.
Although Paley's basic notion was sound, and influenced
thinkers for decades, Paley never provided a rigorous standard for detecting
intelligent design in nature. Detecting design depended on such vague
standards as being able to discern an object's "purpose."
Moreover, Paley and other "natural theologians" tried to reason
from the facts of nature to the existence of a wise and benevolent God.
All of these things made design an easy target for Charles
Darwin when he proposed his theory of evolution. Whereas Paley saw a
finely-balanced world attesting to a kind and just God, Darwin pointed
to nature's imperfections and brutishness. Although Darwin had once
been an admirer of Paley, Darwin's own observations and experiences-especially
the cruel, lingering death of his 9-year-old daughter Annie in 1850-destroyed
whatever belief he had in a just and moral universe.
Following the triumph of Darwin's theory, design theory
was all but banished from biology. Since the 1980s, however, advances
in biology have convinced a new generation of scholars that Darwin's
theory was inadequate to account for the sheer complexity of living
things. These scholars-chemists, biologists, mathematicians and philosophers
of science-began to reconsider design theory. They formulated a new
view of design that avoids the pitfalls of previous versions.
Called intelligent design (ID), to distinguish it from
earlier versions of design theory (as well as from the naturalistic
use of the term design), this new approach is more modest than its predecessors.
Rather than trying to infer God's existence or character from the natural
world, it simply claims "that intelligent causes are necessary
to explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that
these causes are empirically detectable."
In addition to being more modest than earlier versions
of design theory, ID is also more powerful. Instead of looking for such
vague properties as "purpose" or "perfection"-which
may be construed in a subjective sense-it looks for the presence of
what it calls specified complexity, an unambiguously objective standard.
ARN Recommends: For more information about the basic
concept of intelligent design, see the following resources.
- Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science
and Theology William A. Dembski
- Mere Creation: Science, Faith, & Intelligent
Design edited by William A. Dembski
- Rhetoric & Public Affairs Special Issue
on Intelligent Design John Angus Cambell, ed.
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