Intelligent design
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This article contains weasel words, vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. |
Intelligent design is a theory which says that the Universe is so complex that it must have been designed by a higher intelligent being.[1] This theory is that life did not evolve by natural selection. Most creationists use intelligent design as an explanation of how life was formed.[2] Most scientists think intelligent design is not real science because it is not supported by any scientific evidence.[1] They think it is a religious idea which should not be called scientific.
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Theory [change]
Intelligent design suggests that life is too complex to have evolved. Scientists have discovered that even a single cell is complex. The genes in a cell code have a huge amount of information. Therefore that information, like computer programming, has to come from an intelligent source and cannot be made randomly. This is thought to be because the properties of entropy say things cannot grow in complexity by randomness.
It is also argued that although an amino acid could be made randomly, a protein (a long, shaped string of amino acids) is such a precise sequence and structure that it would be impossible to make by chance. Also, a protein or DNA would not do anything by itself; so a whole life form would have to be made all at once. This argument can be seen as a way of saying that natural selection couldn't have created life. It is argued whether that is a valid point.
A common example of this is a bacterial flagellum, which is essentially a microscopic animal version of a very efficient electric motor. The animal has lots of separate parts that wouldn't do anything on their own. If any of the animal's parts are taken away, the animal would die. For the animal to be formed by evolution, every single one of the parts would have to be formed together at just the right time. It is very unlikely that this would happen by chance, even in the hundreds billions of years some evolutionists say how old the world is. This could mean that the world is even older than we think it is. Many scientists say this is not correct. They believe there is evidence that life developed through evolution and no "smart designer" was needed.
A famous person, William Paley, said that life is more complicated than a machine (like as a watch.) He thought that just like a watch was made by a smart designer, when you see an animal you should think that it was also designed. This is known as the watchmaker analogy
Similarities and criticism of Intelligent Design [change]
Many parts of different animals are very similar. People who believe in intelligent design say it shows that a common designer used the same good design ideas in many creations. Some people think this is evidence of evolution; intelligent design suggests that every part of an animal is useful and there for a reason, showing how smart the designer was.
Evolution would suggest that many parts of the same animal should be useless or not very good, because it came from random evolution by trial and error. People have said that many parts of the human body are pointless, but some of these parts were later proved to do important things.
If creatures have similar parts because they came from a common ancestor, then the genes that code for these parts should also be similar. Sometimes this is true; other times similar structures are coded for by entirely different genes. These examples of this kind of different results in data are used to claim that evolution is either wrong or right, causing arguments.
Legal Cases [change]
- Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District - A trial that banned the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. It was ruled that this action would defy the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that the government may not promote one religion over the other. However, it has been argued that the ruling itself promotes humanistic or materialistic religions over deistic religions. Intelligent design was not banned due to a lack of evidence.
- In 2005, in the Dover trial, a United States judge ruled that Intelligent Design was a kind of creationism, so that it violated the First Amendment.[3]
References [change]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Mayled, Jon (2010). GCSE Religious Studies: Philosophy and Applied Ethics for OCR B: Revision Guide. Hodder Education. p. 35. ISBN 9781444110715.
- ↑ Numbers, Ronald L. (2006). The Creationists, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press. pp. 373, 379–380. ISBN 0674023390.
- ↑ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 04 cv 2688 (December 20, 2005)., Conclusion of Ruling.
Other websites [change]
- H. Allen Orr wrote an article for the New Yorker called Devolution: Why intelligent design isn’t. It explains why scientists do not believe intelligent design.
