Tim A
Posts 10
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Obviously the biggest problem with so-called "Intelligent Design" is that the science simply doesn't hold up under scrutiny.
But for those who are too lazy to investigate and understand the actual science involved, I'll point out a couple of simple, philosophical problems with the whole concept of an intelligent designer.
The Perfect Designer
First, ID makes God out to be a bit of a nincompoop. ID theorists claim that every so often, God comes along and re-directs the natural order… sort of a "directed" evolution. But God is supposed to be perfect, all-powerful, and unchanging. Wouldn't such a God just have created everything once, and designed it from the beginning in such a way that he wouldn't need to intervene? This notion that he comes along every so often and makes course corrections suggests he's a bit of an incompetent, and he isn't quite sure what he is doing. It makes no sense. In fact, it makes much more sense to assume that Darwin's theory of evolution was exactly how God intended things to work: he put all the pieces in place, and then let it carry out naturally according to His plan!
On this point alone, I don't understand why any theist would support Intelligent Design. But wait… there's more!
The Design Timeline
Most ID proponents hold that evolution happens on a small scale within species, but it can't create new species. They term this "micro-evolution" vs. "macro-evolution". This differentiation exists only within the ID community. The only thing that limits the changes in "micro-evolution" from creating a new species is the imagination of those who put forth this theory. They forget how long the geological timescale is. How many small changes, when compounded over millions of years, does it take to get to a large change?
The Perfect Design
If the designer was intelligent, he appears to have been far from perfect. Many creationists look at the human body in awe and say, "How could something so complex NOT have been designed?" But there is hardly a part of the human body that we can look at and not think of a way that it could have been designed better.
Some would argue that we humans are not qualified to judge. Since we could not create something as complex as the human body, who are we to judge such a creation? But just because we might not be capable of creating a better design (at least not yet), this does not mean we should be prohibited from pointing out flaws in the existing design. We do this as individuals all the time. We regularly see design flaws in buildings, in computer software, in home appliances. Most of us aren't capable of building these things ourselves, but it doesn't mean that our critique of the design isn't perfectly valid, along with our ability to notice the problems in the design.
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