I was just reading an article about Intelligent Design. It's a valid theory...really! It's had just as much intellectual energy thrown at it over the years as Evolution. In fact, the ID theory been debated much longer, for millennia, because it's Creationism!
This will be a quick post. I just wanted to make one point. ID claims that life is so complex, with so many independently complex systems depending upon each other, it couldn't have been generated randomly. If you stumbled upon a pocket watch, something fairly complex, you would assume it had a creator. And life is more complex than a pocket watch by many orders of magnitude, so how much more would life require a creator?
Intelligent Design proponents mask their Christian puppet master by claiming not to know what or who the intelligence is behind the design. It could be extraterrestrials. Could be anything really. Okay. Let's say it was extraterrestrials, or any other finite being. Creature capable of creating life would have to be awfully advanced. Fine. Pocket watch...earthlings...earthling-creators. The ECs are even more complex than we are, so now they require a creator. You can see where this is going. How far into infinity do you want to travel?
The infinity progression has to end at some point. It must ultimately end at an entity that, although it is infinitely complex (it created everything) it needs no creator. The only entity that could conceivably possess those characteristics is god. Intelligent Design theorists knows exactly who their designer is.
And really that's where ID falls apart. The core claim is that anything very complex requires a designer. But god, IDs final designer is an infinitely (or at least immensely) complex being that has no designer. That's point one. Point two is if ID allows for a complex system or entity to exist that has no designer, why not simply say that life has no designer. Life is far less complex than a god character. ID negates itself by allowing exactly what it purports to deny.
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