It's Simple: Intelligent Design Is Not A Scientific Idea. Period.

Intelligent Design (ID) is not a scientific idea.  Its just not.  And if you think otherwise, then you need to actually learn what "science" is, because right now you're demonstrating that you know less than nothing about it.


Part of the problem is that the terminology used in "design theory" aren't actually defined.  The way that the ID movement uses the word "design", for example, has nothing to do with the definition of "design" as it is normally understood.  "Design" is defined in terms of some intelligent agent actively and purposefully arranging something.  The IDers, on the other hand, define "design" by pointing out what "design" isn't (known regularity and chance), therefore making their definition of "intelligent design" the product of an argument from incredulity.


In engineering, a solution to a problem must address the parameters of the problem, or else the "solution" is no solution at all.  Any theory about design must, therefore, address the agent and the purpose, or else its not really about design.  No proponent of Intelligent Design has ever included the agent or the purpose in any attempt at a "scientific" theory of design, and some absolutely come right out and say that these two factors cannot and  should not be included.  Thus, even if the ID crowd were to somehow prove that the universe was purposefully put together, this proof would be practically meaningless.  And it would certainly say nothing about the design in the usual sense of the word.


The idea of "irreducible complexity" also isn't scientific because it, too, is an example of an Argument from Incredulity fallacy.  "I think this is too complex to come about naturally, therefore it must have been created."  Anyone paying attention should recognize how utterly subjective this is.  Whenever one person can think something "too complex to be natural", but another person can say, "No, its still not complex enough... its still natural", the idea behind it isn't science.  Science is either true, or its not.  There's no "might be true" in science.


Lastly, at its core, intelligent design just makes no damned sense at all.  Take spider webs, for example.  Intelligent design says that, because spider webs are complex acts of engineering, the spiders that make them must be intelligent.


And by "intelligent", they mean the spiders must be as smart as people.


Or, it might be that the spiders aren't the intelligent ones, but rather its the spider's designer who instilled into the spider the ability to create heavily complex webs.  The problem being that it could just as easily be argued that the spider's designer isn't intelligent... its just that the spider designer was himself instilled with the ability to create complexity, and was designed that way.


So the question would then become "who designed the designer?"  Or was the designer's designer merely designed?


Such infinitely regressive nonsense gets us nowhere.


But anyway, last and certainly not least, its been admitted by several of its proponents that the entire "Intelligent Design" thing has nothing to do with science and everything to do with sneaking religion into our science classrooms in a way intended to avoid the First Amendment non-establishment clause.