I can't imagine what these people could be thinking. "Intelligent design"? They must be joking. I'll tell you what "intelligent design" means. It means that a particular purpose is planned and the design is optimized for that purpose. It means that bugs in the design are corrected, so that the designed item (system, machine, whatever) works on its own without having to be corrected. That is intelligent design!
You do not see this in nature. Oh, things might work very mechanistically at the quantum level, or at the galactic level, but look at the details of the areas between. Look at biology, and you don't see flawless, bug-free design. All life is subject to random mutations in reproduction. Humans can be born with horrendous problems, both physically and mentally. You call this good design?
If you want a detailed, real-life example, you need look no further than my family. Nearly all of my uncles and my mother had diabetes. That genetic error got passed on to me. Terrific. My brother was born severely retarded. All his life has been a long horror for both him and the family. How DARE anyone tell me that we are designed "intelligently"? If that were so, I would have no choice but to conclude that the designer involved meant for these things to happen to us. Fine thing for that loving, intelligent designer to do, eh?
But let's look at things a little deeper. What would you expect to find in a system that has no real, directed control? You'd expect things to go screwy from time to time; you'd expect things to be unpredictable. You'd also expect that evolution would occur. Perhaps this is why so many fundamentalists don't care for the idea of evolution -- it implies that there isn't a controlling designer. Well, so what? The fact that humans are subject to imperfect reproduction and susceptible to literally thousands of diseases and infirmities also argues against this designer. Particularly if you think that designer is actively creating and loves its creations.
Some folks like to point to the way the Earth is situated in space and say "It's placed in just the right spot for humans to live!." To which I again say "So what?"
The Earth is just one speck of rubble in the solar system, and the solar system is just one of very likely millions of star systems that have planets just in this galaxy. Do you think that there's a chance that there are other planets circling other stars that come close to the Earth's parameters? You can just about rely on it, in a universe as huge and varied as ours. To get an idea of how huge this universe is, look t the photo from the Hubble telescope below:
Nearly every item in this image is a galaxy, every bit as huge and varied as our own.
But what about Earth's parameters? Most people don't seem to realize that our distance away from the Sun varies by about 3-4 million miles during the course of the year. Do these people think that the planet's tilt of about 23 degrees is "fine tuned" to meet human specifications? That a tilt of 20 degrees would make life here impossible? That's just plain ridiculous. I even saw one ID web site that listed Jupiter's moons as a necessary ingredient for human life on Earth. I've never seen the reasoning behind that claim... they just left it there to hang out in public for scientifically literate people to laugh at, and for ID believers to marvel at.
I sometimes wonder what ID folks think of the possibility of life on other planets. Are they thinking that Earth is the only place in the universe where life could exist? I know that the Vatican once had a discussion over whether they would need to evangelize any intelligent aliens we might discover... showing just how far some fanatics will go down the road of silliness. But in all seriousness, do Intelligent Design people really think that the universe was created to produce and support humans and nothing else?
If so, they appear to have a taste for waste. A universe that needs to exist only to support humans need only be 1 billion miles across. At the most. At the billion-mile boundary, you could put a solid, spherical wall to contain the whole mess. Then the god in charge of it could carry it around, trade it with other deities, have a grand time tinkering with it, or put it up on his mantle in his den and glance at it whenever it suited his fancy.
But I suspect that most ID'ers don't think that way. Which is cool... I don't either. But let's look at the facts, then. The Earth is a pretty neat place for life to exist, but it appears to be the only place in the Solar System (that billion-mile sphere I mentioned) where that's true. It might not be, though. We are pretty sure there is an ocean of liquid water on Europa, and maybe even some on Ganymede. There have been very interesting pieces of evidence that liquid water existed on Mars long ago. Who knows? There are photos from the landers that look like fossils. What would ID folks make of that, I wonder? The implications would be most interesting. Life wouldn't be rare in the universe after all (let alone "unique!"), and the parameters for life wouldn't be as narrow as ID folks would want. Too bad.
Putting that speculation aside, though, what about the rest of the universe? Go outside on a clear, dark night and look at the Milky Way. If you're in the Southern Hemisphere, look also at the Magellanic Clouds. There you will see literally millions of stars just like our Sun. Even assuming that the Earth is a rare fluke, how could you look at that sight and think that there aren't hundreds of planets with life out there, just in our immediate cosmic neighborhood?
Now, getting back to more mundane matters, I have a question about the whole concept of I.D. The classic statement of I.D. is the idea of coming across a watch and thinking "it must have been created by an intelligent being." That's a natural response, perhaps. But why? Is it because the watch is complex? Or is it because the watch is fundamentally unlike the natural things around it? That's a question to ponder, and I'll leave you with that. I may add more when I've spent a little more time learning about the back-and-forth of this idea.
