brian.holly
Posts: 1 Joined: May 2005
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Top 5 reasons intelligent design is nonsense:
1. Reliance on ad ignoratiam arguments. This is just the old "you can't produce an eye" by chance argument, which completely ignores the fact that evolutionary biologists have traced a clear and logical progression in stages from having a few light sensitive cells to having a full-blown human eye, with each stage showing an adaptive advantage. Behe tries to use the same tactic with complex proteins.This is just foolishness. Evolution hasn't explained everything yet, but it keeps explaining more and more.
2. Intelligent Design fails to explain. An explanation has to explain why things are one way rather than another, but ID has no theory of what we might expect the Big Designer in the sky to do. "A magic being did it," explains nothing.
3. Intelligent Design just pushes the problem back. The most crucial thing ID should explain is, well, intelligence, but it leaves it wholly unexplained. Evolution has an explanation for how intelligence arose, starting with a few neural cells and progressing in advantageous stages step by step to the most complex structure known in the universe, the human brain. ID says in effect, well, let's just assume the existence of something even more complex and wondrous: a super-intelligence.
4. ID is incoherent. Everything depends on the mind of the Intelligent Designer, but no coherent theory of the ID's mind is possible. By hypothesis, the Designer existed before the universe, but then where did he get his ideas for designing the universe? Ideas can have two sources: they can be derived from experience or they can be innate. Neither explanation could explain the where the Designer's ideas came from. And if the plan for the universe just arose spontaneously in the mind of the Designer, then that is an even greater wonder than the spontaneous big bang.
5. ID contradicts everything we know about intelligence. Intelligence, by its very nature, involves storage and processing of information, and this can only be done within a physical structure. To suppose that there could have been information processing before there was any physical reality is nonsense.
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