ID/IOT as Philosophy

James Harrington at Tech Central Station has an article titled, The Flawed Philosophy of Intelligent Design.

The time has come to be blunt. The problem with Intelligent Design is not that it is false; not that the arguments in its favor reduce to smoke and mirrors; and not that it's defenders are disingenuous or even duplicitous. The problem with Intelligent Design is that it is dumb. I would contend that ID is dumb biology; even if it is on to something, what it is on to has no connection and does no meaningful work in biology (or physics). However, and more significantly, ID is dumb philosophy.

Harrington looks at two competing philosophies, naturalism and non-naturalism.

Naturalism has a certain elegant simplicity. Its fundamental assertion is that what you see is what you get. The world is the way it seems to be, and there is no call to introduce anything outside the knowable and discoverable universe.

Non-naturalism, on the other hand, treats the world as an open system, and at least one entity – at least one force or being – intervenes to cause what we see in the world around us. This seems to address the weirdness we see, from quantum physics to chaotic systems in the macroscopic realm.

According to ID, the world perked along perfectly fine for several billion years according to the rules of physics. Over most of space-time the naturalists have it basically right, things just sort of go the way they seem they should. Then, a couple of billion years ago, along came The Designer, not itself the product of those processes. It showed up and decided to take a bunch of these otherwise perfectly natural chemicals and put them together to make bacteria and then designed in a replication system. Then it left it alone for another several million years and decided, "Hey, I've got these bacteria around, let's collect them into these other things." And, so forth.

But, this is just dumb! It takes the real virtues of both real alternatives and turns them on their heads. If naturalists value metaphysical simplicity, the simplicity of ID becomes simplemindedness. The ID theorist response to any puzzle is to demand a simple solution, even if the simple solution amounts to deus ex machina. This isn't just lazy philosophy; it's lazy fiction. On the other hand, if non-naturalists have a valuable sensitivity to the messiness of the real world, the ID theorists goal is to make that messiness go away. Pointing at every gap in our understanding and saying, "See there goes God, or whoever." isn't sensitivity to complexity; it's just stupidity.

One of the problems with ID/IOT is that it essentially abandons the quest for knowledge, and draws the curtain of ignorance over any questions about the world.

Consider the following example. Imagine yourself as a visiting alien; when surveying "Africa" you discover large termite mounds. Most of the crew gets right down to the business of studying termites and figuring out how they manage to produce their nests. But, a few make a different claim. Given that the termites are clearly not sentient, they decide that the termites could not possibly have built their nests in the absence of an independent sentient nest designer – The Termite Farmer. Therefore, they take off and go looking for The Termite Farmer instead of studying what termites actually do.

When faced with any answered question, especially a messy one, ID/IOT serenely explains to us, "I don't know, and you don't either, even if you think you do."