Intellectual design or ID is the grandchild of the famous watchmaker analogy dreamed up by a clergyman – William Paley in 1802. He wrote that if one came upon a watch in a field one would marvel at the intricate and complex mechanism and that it must have been guided and produced by an intelligent being. Therefore the fact that complex organisms exist is evidence for the existence of God.
But along came Charles Darwin who had studied Paley’s writings yet saw instead that from innumerable random mutations in the DNA that makes up an organism’s genes one mutation may result in the improvement of an organ’s function which would increase its chances for survival. For Darwin evolution largely reflects the combined action of these random mutations and natural selection repeated over billions of years resulting in incremental improvements. These improvements produce organisms that were “exquisitely adapted” to their environments and would look like they were designed. Evolution is not “just one possible explanation of life,” it is THE explanation of life and the foundation of our modern life. Creationism was junk science in the 70’s and in its metamorphosed form of ID it is still junk science.
There is no debate because good science does no debate with bad science. Evolution has been proven over and over again, scientists are now just squabbling over minutiae (such as the reason why the peppered moth evolved dark color). ID will never be proven because no research can be or has been conducted at all due to the fact that it is not science but faith. Faith or mysticism is the unreal, that which must be believed blindly. The true object of ID is to save religion – to save God from the onslaught of science and knowledge. “Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason” (Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World – Philosophy Who Needs it by Ayn Rand).
Although ID accepts parts of evolution today, they claim that God designed the first atoms or the first cell, depending on who you read. But it is really the last gasps of magic and mysticism from a bygone era. Statistically 1.3 million kids drop out of school between the eighth and twelfth grade and the rest are bored or can barely read or write. Two thirds of students applying to colleges are unprepared to do college level work. To bring ID into the classroom would be a terrible detriment to students who are poorly educated and not prepared intellectually even for this gasping, small dragon of ID. Their minds filled with non-concepts such as egalitarianism, environmentalism, global warming, multiculturalism how can they possibly grasp the complicated concepts that make up evolution and then compare it to a hoax such as ID that comes dressed up as science. ID is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Ayn Rand wrote in her article The Age of Mediocrity: “To claim that the mystics’ mythology, or inventions, or superstitions are as valid as scientific theories, and to offer this claim to the unformed minds of children, is a moral crime. But to the extent that a child trusts his teacher, he would be inclined to accept him on faith and to doubt his own mind….”
How can America survive and thrive with citizens that do not have confidence in their ability to think and reason? Each new step forward from discovering new cures for Alzheimers to finding the right set of equations that will propel man to the stars is based on a foundation of scientific reasoning that scientists can have confidence in not faith.
There is no debate, there is no controversy and there is no questioning of the grand theory of evolution among scientists and there has not been debate for decades. Without the underpinning of evolution there would be no modern science. Fields such as Comparative Biology, genetics or immunology simply would not exist. We would have no pharmaceutical companies producing antibiotics for bacterial diseases, vaccines for measles, mumps and polio or drugs to help AIDS sufferers and diabetics. We would not have surgeons performing heart or liver transplants. In sum there would not be any integration of knowledge only descriptions of things; no connections, only disintegrated snippets of data. We would still be in the 19th century wondering in amazement, with Paley, who the designer of that intricate clock was. The question is – in the 21st century, why are we still wondering?
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