Unintelligent Design

Intelligent Design is not accepted by most scientists. And I say this not because I'm helping to Googlebomb the term Intelligent Design... well, I am, but I'm also saying it because it's true.

Intelligent Design is nothing more than part of the Creationists' Wedge strategy to get the illogical Christian dogma that everything popped out of nothing taught in American public schools :

We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

By using a religiously-neutral term like "intelligent design", which really can mean anything one imagines, including human design - after all, some humans are intelligent - they hope to be able to mimic the scientific approach and speak of God and Jesus in purely abstract terms. But Intelligent Design is not and will never be scientific, because it shares none of the properties of science : it is not falsifiable - at least, not the way Creationists use it - it is not based on observations, it is not based on previous knowledge, and it is not naturalistic.

But it is falsifiable in the sense that we can observe animals and whether their composition corresponds to intelligent agency or natural agency. Given that all animals use the exact same code, that their proteins are coded in the same way, we know for a fact that there is no possibility of our current species being created by divine agency. The possibility of all these things arising by non-natural, random chance is so improbable as to make Intelligent Design ridiculous.

A designer also would also not need vestigial organs (the most obvious being the vestigial legs in whales) or things like marine mammals unable to breathe underwater or the pitiful design of the human knee and back, made for non-upright walking - the fact that we have them shows that what we have here is a natural process that cannot "start over".

If there is any design in nature at all, then it must be Unintelligent Design. And perhaps the most stunning proof of this, is the existence of Creationists.