"Is ID Really Rooted in Science?"

Granville Sewell has just made this very important and sure-to-be-controversial suggestion:

"[V]irtually all of the good arguments against design come from outside science, they are all basically philosophical, or even religious, objections. If it were not for these problems, I don’t believe anyone could possibly look at mathematics, or physics, or chemistry, or especially at biology, without seeing design. The scientific evidence for design in Nature is absolutely overwhelming, it leaps out at you from every corner of science.

"The popular picture of ID proponents is that we are trying to take a purely religious idea and smuggle it into science, where it does not fit. This picture could not possibly be more backward. Why do we keep insisting that ID is rooted in science? Because... it is!"

Emphasis is in the original. (And what he wrote in that ellipsis makes a lot of sense in context.)

The philosophical and religious objections he is referring to are these:

• The steady progress of science in explaining other things that were previously attributed to design

• The difficulty of seeing design in human history (the problem of evil)

• The history of religion

He lists these as examples, so maybe he has others also in mind. He summarizes it all in this way:

"There are, in fact, some fairly persuasive reasons to believe that the development of life was due to natural causes, but when we honestly analyze them, they all reduce to the argument 'this doesn’t look like the way a designer would have done things.' Darwin himself used this argument frequently in 'Origin of Species'."

What about evidence of common descent, though? It doesn't determine a thing, actually; it's neutral on the matter of design. There is no within-science reason to assume that common descent excludes a designer.

Here's further support for Sewell's thesis: go back through the literature for and against ID, both popular and technical, and see who says religion is a vital issue in the discussion. Overwhelmingly, you'll find, it's the other side, not ID.

Posted: Fri - April 13, 2007 at 12:13 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

"Is ID Really Rooted in Science?"

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson