In this blog post, we will look at why intelligent design theory is not recognized as science and whether it can still present new possibilities for scientific inquiry.
A few years ago, a legal battle over intelligent design took place in the Dover area of Pennsylvania, USA. The teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to the theory of evolution in science classes was ruled unconstitutional. This case sparked a major debate across society about the relationship between science education and religion, and provided an opportunity to think deeply about the nature and limitations of intelligent design.
Intelligent design theory is a theory that considers the origin and development of life to be the design work of an intelligent designer and explores the basis for this. This theory starts from the intuition that highly complex and sophisticated biological structures cannot be the product of chance. It emerged as an attempt to fill in the gaps that evolutionary theory cannot explain, especially in terms of the mechanisms of biological evolution. However, the concept of “designer” that intelligent design is trying to address is very vague, and the “designer” reminds one of the Christian God, and since the advocates of intelligent design have presented their theories from the perspective of Christians, the theory was ruled to be in violation of the principle of separation of church and state. As a result, intelligent design is currently excluded from the framework of science education.
However, intelligent design itself focuses only on the design process, not on the designer. The theory argues that biological systems are so intricately intertwined that they cannot be explained by gradual changes through natural selection through the concept of “irreducible complexity.” As such, presenting intelligent design as an explanation for the complexity of the natural world can provide a new perspective as part of the scientific discussion. However, from this perspective, intelligent design is not a religious theory but a creative biological theory that offers a new perspective on the origin of life.
The core argument of intelligent design is “irreducible complexity.” Living things are too sophisticated to have been created by chance through gradual changes. If even one of the elements that make up a living thing goes wrong, it loses its function and becomes ill or dies. The main example given by intelligent design proponents is that the probability of a watch being assembled by putting the watch parts in a pocket and shaking it is close to zero. Since the emergence of intelligent design, many scientists who believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution as the process of biological development have argued various counterarguments against intelligent design, and most of the arguments currently made by intelligent design proponents have been refuted. However, before the fact that intelligent design theory is wrong, the discussion on whether to accept intelligent design theory within the category of “science” is still ongoing. When focusing on the methodology rather than the basis of intelligent design theory, intelligent design theory is worthy of being considered as a science.
First, we need to define what science is. Generally, science refers to the natural sciences, which are the study of various natural phenomena through mathematical deduction and experimentation. However, if we dig deeper, we will find that not all of these disciplines are recognized as science, and various positions on what defines science have been presented within the field of philosophy of science. In particular, verificationism and falsificationism have been considered representative criteria for determining whether a discipline is science or not, and they are also the main reasons why intelligent design was not accepted as science in the Dover Area debate. Verificationism is the position that a hypothesis must be actually proven by empirical facts, while refutationalism is the position that a refutation must be observable. From this perspective, the intelligent designer theory is not science because the intelligent designer, as described in the theory, cannot be proven to exist or not exist empirically.
However, there are many disciplines that have already been recognized as science even if it is not possible to prove the hypothesis empirically. In disciplines such as quantum mechanics, string theory, and the theory of parallel universes, it is impossible to prove the existence of electrons with probability distributions, the basic units of all things, strings, and other universes outside of this universe, which are the central objects of these theories. Nevertheless, decades of active research have been conducted on these disciplines, and as a result, humanity is benefiting from the most advanced technologies of our time, such as computers and mobile phones. Under these circumstances, it is not right to treat the non-provability of intelligent design as unscientific simply because it was proposed by the supporters of theistic evolution and because intelligent designers remind people of the Christian God.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the aforementioned type of study can be considered as science because it is based on other verifiable and falsifiable auxiliary hypotheses that support the central content. For example, quantum mechanics explains natural phenomena by applying the basic concepts of classical mechanics, such as the equation describing the movement of particles and the equation describing the change of waves, to a new theory called the Schrödinger equation. Therefore, although it is not possible to actually verify whether a cat in the state of neither dead nor alive exists in the Schrödinger equation, the classical mechanical concepts that led to the theory have already been empirically proven by many people for hundreds of years.
However, this argument can be applied equally to intelligent design. Many natural phenomena that intelligent design proponents claim to exhibit “irreducible complexity” have been disproved by biologists, i.e. “demonstrated” to be untrue through the “empirical method.” For example, the flagella that bacteria use as rotating motors, the three-dimensional and clear images produced by the eyes of animals, and the blood that shows the various stages of coagulation have been shown through various biological studies to function even if some biological elements such as proteins or amino acid sequences are missing. In addition, the ‘specificized complexity’ advocated by William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design, is also based on the probability theory and information theory used in conventional mathematics. For example, if a seemingly random and complex string of characters, “nfuijolt ju jt mjlf b xfbtfm,” is moved one letter backward in the alphabet using the Caesar cipher, the result is a line from Hamlet, “methinks it is like a weasel.” Therefore, the text can be considered to have been identified.
One of the research methods used in intelligent design that uses the method of verification is to find rules and discover specificities in seemingly accidental phenomena.
Another argument against intelligent design as a scientific theory is that the process of verification itself is not well established, and in particular, because there are no peer-reviewed arguments, it is not suitable as a scientific research method. Richard Dawkins said in “Why Religion is Trying to Become a Science” that peer review is a very important process in scientific research because it is a procedure by which scientists write their empirical research and share it with fellow experts in the same field so that hypotheses are open to research, verification, and criticism. However, all of the more than 30 papers that have studied biological evidence of evolution have been peer-reviewed, while the ID theory has no such publications, they claimed.
This is an arrogant claim by those who can be considered the mainstream of the scientific community. The reason why the ID theory has not received sufficient peer review is also related to its social standing. Because the theory of evolution has been accepted as the orthodoxy in science, there has been no active research on intelligent design, and naturally, peer-reviewed research results have not been published. In this reality, the claim that intelligent design is not suitable as a scientific research method does not point out the methodological flaws of intelligent design, but rather means that intelligent design itself has been rejected because it is different from the existing scientific community. As a result, even though intelligent design theory can raise important new issues in scientific research, the theory itself is completely excluded from the scientific community, resulting in the theory losing the opportunity to be discussed.
In conclusion, intelligent design theory should not be treated as unscientific simply because it cannot be empirically proven. It is only not recognized as science because it has not been sufficiently recognized by the scientific community. Under these circumstances, it will take time for the public to recognize that intelligent design is a discipline based on scientific research methods that have been empirically proven. However, since the value of scholarship is not simply to support existing theories but to present and explore new perspectives, intelligent design should be given ample opportunity to be discussed and developed as a field of scientific research.
