I just stumbled over an old article, titled "The Other ID Opponents". It seems that intelligent design critics are getting some strange bedfellows: Young-earth creationists! Yes, the people who're supposedly using intelligent design as their trojan horse are openly criticizing it: "The most recent attack on Genesis, one that to AiG's [Answers in Genesis] dismay is accepted and promoted by evangelicals, is Intelligent Design."

"I don't think the ID movement would be where it is even now if it was not for the general creation movement," says Ken Ham, president of AiG. "They're riding on the coattails of the creation movement."

This is probably true in the sense that many people buying books and in other ways creating a market for intelligent design could just as well have been buying books on creationism. However, by divorcing itself from defending a particular Biblical account, intelligent design has also accomplished things that creationism could never have accomplished. For example, it is a fact that without intelligent design, there would be no "Krauze". There wouldn't be any front-loading either. And knowing what I do about my fellow bloggers, I doubt that there would be a "Telic Thoughts".

These young-earth creationists understand the issue much better than most critics. As Terry Mortenson from AiG puts it: "Most if not all of the ID books are published by evangelical Christian publishers, which are marketing to an evangelical audience. And our concern is that [although] in those books there are good design arguments, there are statements sprinkled in them implying or stating openly that Genesis isn't important."

Yes, most supporters of intelligent design are Christians. But the source of an argument isn't waht matters, it's the contents. And, as Mortenson points out, intelligent design doesn't try to defend Genesis or any other religious text. That's why supporters of intelligent design can also be evolutionists (such as myself), whereas creationists can't.

But as with regular ID critics, there are also some things these creationists misunderstand:

"Those of us who believe in a literal Genesis have a history, a history concerning the Fall, a history concerning the Flood. So when we look at this world, we're looking at a fallen world. It's not God's fault there are tsunamis. "¦ Death is not God's fault." However, by only discussing an unnamed designer, Ham says, flaws in creation must be attributed to that designer.

When talking about "tsunamis" being the work of a designer, Ken Ham makes it clear that he thinks the designer must be behind every feature of nature. Yet this is not something that would follow if intelligent design was correct. In his book Cosmos, Carl Sagan suggests using genetically modified microorganisms to terraform Mars, melting the ice and producing oxygen. If this were to happen, we would say that life on Mars had been intelligently designed. But would this mean that every future climate change that happened on Mars, whether good or bad, should be attributed to us? Hardly.

What's great about intelligent design is that it asks a question not asked by any other field of enquiry: Is it possible to infer design without having any experience with the designer? So, let's put on our ID Hat and see if there's anything about tsunamis that indicate that they are designed. Neither irreducible complexity nor specified complexity - the two most popular ID concepts - seem to apply very well to tsunamis. Furthermore, we'll have a hard time describing a tsunami in teleological terms. "The function of a tsunami is to…" What? Kill people? Move a lot of water? Wash sediments into the ocean? Provide footage for news reports? I think it's safe to say that the case for tsunamis being designed isn't very strong.

But what about bad biological designs? Let's take the type III secretory system, which is a syringe-like structure that some bacteria use to inject toxins into their hosts. Here, the case for design is much stronger than for tsunamis. Unlike tsunamis, the secretory system is an irreducibly complex molecular machine, composed of twenty different gene-products. Furthermore, its function is obvious: Pumping substances into other cells. So, a system that causes human disease seems to be designed.

As Ken Ham pointed out, there's nothing in intelligent design that precludes the design of structures that harm humans (although it would raise the question of why the designer would make designs that harmed each other); weapon designers do this all the time. But let's add evolution to the mix. First of all, not all bacteria with a secretory system use it to inject toxins. For example, the bacterium Rhizobium use its secretory system to transfer nitrogen to plants, which return the favor by providing the bacterium with nutrients. So the secretory system can also be used to establish symbiotic relationsships. Furthermore, it is now clear that the secretory system is related to another favorite of intelligent design - the bacterial flagellum - and that it was the flagellum that gave rise to the secretory system, not the other way around. The flagellum contains a pump to construct the whip-like part, and the secretory system is best seen as the pump of a flagellum, with most of the other parts cut away. So the secretory system is probably the descendent of a design, not the actual design itself.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 26th, 2006 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Creationism, Intelligent Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. The trackback link is: http://telicthoughts.com/the-other-id-opponents/trackback/