As someone who confesses genuine enquiry into truth, it’s imperative that I challenge my current way of thinking from time to time so as not to box myself in with black and white dogmatic views. If there is one thing I’ve learnt on my journey of truth is that more often than not there seems to be two sides (often more) to every story. Lately I’ve been looking into evolution. Evolution is something I’ve found myself on every side of the argument. I started out as a young earth creationist, believing in the literalistic biblical view that the earth was roughly around 6000 years old. It wasn’t until I was challenged by a few science educated Christians who held theistic evolutionary beliefs that convinced me to start educating myself on the theory of evolution and look more into it myself. This in turn led me to theistic evolution which I held for a while until my theological views began to fail me and I now preside within a naturalistic evolutionary world view, with strong feelings of agnosticism when it comes to the origin of those first elements of life.
I recently watched this interesting documentary on intelligent design:
I think intelligent design as a philosophy asks some very good fundamental questions about the complexity of life. However I think its bad science to stop at a point when observing the biological functions of say a cell, and say oh these parts are irreducibly complex, therefore it must be intelligently designed. I don’t understand what that achieves? Or how that is science? Unless a theory can be tested, or give us predictions about the future in which to validate the hypothesis, than it simply isn’t science. Science is about continually gathering data and asking ourselves questions about the natural world and pushing the boundaries of our knowledge. Lots of things in our past have looked to be “intelligently designed” only for science to discover natural laws that govern these once thought mysteries. It doesn’t make sense to me to stop at a point when we’ve come so far in evolutionary biology and say this is irreducibly complex and this is far as we can go. Now let’s be honest for a second, there is a lot science is yet to explain, but just because we can’t explain something today doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a natural explanation or that we won’t be able to find one tomorrow. A short look through the history of science will reveal this.
Another point I just can’t shake is that intelligent design seems to have a great deal of underlying theological and religious implications to its observations. By saying that something is irreducibly complex and intelligently designed actually tells us, well nothing. Unless of course you bring whatever theological designer you wish to the table. This opens up the flood gates for anyone with a certain perspective on who that intelligent designer was. This is fine in the arena of philosophy or religion, but not in science. Science says nothing on whom or what that designer was. To insert a particular designer is nothing more than playing God of the Gaps in our lack of understanding about certain scientific or philosophical questions.
Overall I felt the documentary was very one sided (as most documentaries are). Many times in the documentary I was waiting for them to interview other prominent scientist in the same field who reject intelligent design and irreducible complexity (which there are many!) But they never showed up. So to even things up I found a couple of lengthy videos that argue against intelligent design, not only have I found two great men of their scientific field, but I have found two scientist who hold strong theistic beliefs, in that they believe in a God, yet reject intelligent design as a science and call it out for what they believe it really is. I’ll leave it up to you guys to make up your own minds:
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