Darwin Ist Tot: Intelligent Design is Not Creationism

One man’s magic is another man’s science.
Religious essayist Rev. Eric Strachan of the New Life Community Church in Ontario, Canada has published a short essay in The Daily Observer called “The Wonders of Intelligent Design.”

Strachan writes: “There’s a difference in the things that God creates, and the stuff that men and women design, a world of difference, you simply cannot compare the two, it’s like comparing the artistry of Van Gogh with a pre-Kindergarten kid picking up a paintbrush for the first time. ”

It’s a pity this folksie contrast between the relative engineering skills of man v. God does nothing to advance my own knowledge of Intelligent Design or the controversy surrounding it.

If Strachan had taken the time during his travels to consider the relative impact of the Anthropic Principle on the Final Theory of Everything, I might better have enjoyed the time I spent reading his article.

Heady stuff like the Anthropic Principle or the framework for an organized Theory of Everything are not typically on the minds of Pastors, Priests, Rabbis, or Imams — or any other ceremonial defender of an Ordered Universe.

Science is practiced by scientists, not by priests. But recently science and religion appear to have become indistinguishable, as for example in their respective institutional intolerance of competing ideas.

The nominal bishops of the U.S. Scientific Establishment, for instance, have declared in a virtual edict that Intelligent Design is the stuff of “magic” — not science.

As good vassals to the establishment, the mainstream media has accepted the responsibility to take science and magic and sunder them separate for the benefit of the laity.

But as Arthur C. Clark noted many years ago in his Three Laws, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

One man’s magic, it seems, is another man’s science.

“Intelligent Design Creationism”
Strachan’s article appeared in my daily Google News Alert on the key words “Intelligent Design.”

My daily crop of the term “Intelligent Design” on Google News usually brings a plurality of articles that have in common a missionary intent to define Intelligent Design as a hands-down flavor of biblical creationism.

It’s almost as though everyone in the Science-as-Public-Opinion business got a YouTube saying something to the effect, “Attention all Science Opinion contributors in the Main Stream Media: The following is an instruction from the Supreme Politburo at Central Command. You are hereby advised that whenever you are forced to use the two words ‘Intelligent’ and ‘Design’ together in the same sentence, you must ALWAYS include ‘Creationism’ as a qualifier. If you have questions about this, please submit them in writing to your supervisor. That is all.”

Here’s a sampling from a recent google news search of the term “Intelligent Design“…

1. “…despite the fact that creationism, along with its uptown cousin “intelligent design,” keeps getting expelled…” – Tornoto Star
2. “Polls have shown some Americans don’t even know the Earth orbits the sun. These same Americans believe in intelligent design creationism which is nothing more than a childish belief in magic. Teaching intelligent design magic is child abuse. This nonsense doesn’t belong anywhere, not even in Sunday School.”- South Coast Today
3. “Young earth creation science and its fraternal twin, Intelligent Design profess that a great supernatural entity (God) created the world and all life on it.” – IndeNews
4. “The National Academy of Science, America’s most prestigious group of scientists, has recently published an update of Science, Evolution, and Creationism that states: “the claims of intelligent design creationists are disproved by the findings of modern biology.” Democrat and Chronicle.

This list goes on and on.

Conflating Intelligent Design with biblical creationism is a facile attempt to mold the minds of people who might otherwise be interested in the topic of Intelligent Design as a stand-alone course of study.

As Institutions, Media and Academia have taken on Intelligent Design with a palpable and sustained ferocity. The results of the Kitzmiller fiasco has also lent a fig leaf of legal legitimacy to the anti-ID movement.

The Prevailing Wind
Based on these current scientific and media biases, it would seem that Richard Dawkins has been appointed our veritable Minister of Science and Chief Defender of the Faith.

And despite the existence of a few intellectual rebels in the media, it should be noted that a majority of academic scientists are known to prefer the simple comforts of Dumb Mechanics over the ugly prospects of Intelligent Intention. Unlikely as it may be, the Orthodox Majority believes Blind Chance to be the Ultimate Cause of the Big Bang and the DNA molecule.

Remarkably, these writers and scientists seem to religiously avoid any discussion of a well-documented Anthropic phenomenon called the Observation Selection Effect (perhaps preferring instead the much easier task of denouncing the ignorance of Young Earth Creationists, or YECs).

But as we may note from the Double Slit Experiment, the simple act of observation may turn out to be a Cause in Itself.

In other words, at some level, observation may be a self-creating process.

If this is true, it follows that collective observation may be required in order for history to have occurred at all!

If the Observation Selection Effect is required for the Universe to exist, could we also infer that a real-time Observer of the Big Bang was required in order for it to have occurred in the first instance?

The Shifting Paradigm: Science as a Text of Human History
If the dissenters eventually have their way — and Intelligent Design becomes an accepted model for the origin of the universe — the current era of Scientific Positivism will itself become history.

In response to this threat, a Popperian Orthodoxy has emerged in the media and across the academic world. Science writers who want the biscuit must always declare a strict separation between science and magic in their public writings on ID. Likewise, Intelligent Design must never be acknowledged as being connected with the former, but always the latter.

And after all – Intelligent Design has no pedigree, as Positivism does. No new paradigm of science could possibly overtake the sainted Karl Popper – at least among the orthodox establishment.

The fabric of reality is the privileged province of a different kind of priest — a highly trained and vetted Priest of Science.

Popper is Challenged
No one doubts that there exists a plethora of Popperian loyalists in the Biological Sciences. But in the fields of Physics and Quantum Mechanics, the Many Worlds Interpretation of the universe — though inherently non-falsifiable — has been well-accepted for decades.

We note, for instance, that National Academy of Science member Leonard Susskind can be witnessed putting down an orthodox Popperian in this 2006 Nature article on the “multiverse” hypothesis:

Since the early 1980s, some cosmologists have argued that multiple universes could have formed during a period of cosmic inflation that preceded the Big Bang. More recently, string theorists have calculated that there could be 10>500 universes, which is more than the number of atoms in our observable Universe. Under these circumstances, it becomes more reasonable to assume that several would turn out like ours. It’s like getting zillions and zillions of darts to throw at the dart board, Susskind says.”Surely, a large number of them are going to wind up in the target zone.” And of course, we exist in our particular Universe because we couldn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an intriguing idea with just one problem, says Gross:  It’s impossible to disprove.  Because our Universe is, almost by definition, everything we can observe, there are no apparent measurements that would confirm whether we exist within a cosmic landscape of multiple universes, or if ours is the only one. And because we can’t falsify the idea, Gross says, it isn’t science.

Susskind, too, finds it “deeply, deeply troubling” that there’s no way to test the principle. But he is not yet ready to rule it out completely. “It would be very foolish to throw away the right answer on the basis that it doesn’t conform to some criteria for what is or isn’t science,” he says. [Emphasis added.]

(Geoff Brumfiel, “Outrageous Fortune,” Nature, Vol 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).)

Despite Susskind’s apologies, it is obvious that for him, the “right answer” is not dependent on the approval of Karl Popper.

The Occam’s Razor solution for the Double Slit Experiment is also obvious: Many Worlds is the simplest explanation for the evidence.

And if the Multiverse is the True Condition of our universe, then Intelligent Design automatically becomes a viable explanation for its origin and existence.

Offering a Proof
Professor Frank Tipler, a protege of renown American Physicist John Wheeler, is a peer reviewed scientist who favors the Many Worlds Interpretation. Tipler has, in his Omega Point Theory (OPT), developed what is in effect a mathematical proof for the existence of God.

Tipler’s proof has been reviewed and credited by Oxford physicist (and winner of the Paul Dirac Award) David Deutsch, in chapter 14 of his seminal book, the Fabric of Reality.

In his book, Deutsch acknowledged that the OPT is a legitimate model for a universe that could eventuate in a super-computational intelligence.

If professor Susskind in correct that the fabric of reality is founded in the Multiverse, then all of the conditions required for the emergence of the Omega Point are satisfied within the context of the Observation Selection Effect. In other words, in some universe somewhere, God may naturally emerge to Observe Himself. In so doing, He would effect all the possible strands of the Multiverse, and thus bring Himself – and us – into Being.

The above essay is offered as OPINION.

On the subject of academic freedom for proponents of Intelligent Design, IDTheFuture has a great podcast available for download.