Review of The Privileged Planet

Review of The Privileged Planet
(National Center for Science Education)

Unfortunately, it means that the ancient argument from design (of which this book is just a modern example) is scientifically useless. There is no conceivable evidence that could, even in principle, refute the notion that everything happens as a result of an unconstrained, very powerful “designer.” This is because such an entity can be invoked to explain any evidence whatsoever. Real scientific hypotheses have to be vulnerable to evidence. It must be possible to imagine evidence that would undermine them (see Pennock 1999, ch 6, for an extensive discussion). This is not the case for a mysterious “intelligent designer” of nature so unspecified that one cannot even make predictions about what one would expect to observe if it existed.