Monday, April 11, 2005

Unintelligible Redesign

Unintelligible Redesign
This is the way creationism ends. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.
by William Saletan (Slate)
A theory isn’t just a bunch of criticisms, even if they’re valid. A theory ties things together. It explains and predicts. Intelligent design does neither. It doesn’t explain why part of our history seems intelligently designed and part of it doesn’t. Why are our feet and our back muscles poorly designed for walking? Why are we afflicted by lethal viruses? Why have so many females died in childbirth? ID doesn’t explain these things. It just shrugs at them. “Design theory seeks to show, based on scientific evidence, that some features of living things may be designed by a mind or some form of intelligence,” says one ID proponent. Some? May? Some? What kind of theory is that?

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