I enjoyed the articles about intelligent design and the efforts of its creationist supporters to sneak it into the public schools.
One of the sneakiest features of ID is that its advocates avoid stating their hypothesis clearly. If ID means that the universe does not contain “designs” inferior to what we would expect of a competent human engineer, then ID is factually wrong. There are many, many examples of inefficient, unnecessarily complicated, even tragically bungled “design” in nature. What intelligent being would use deadly genetic diseases (thalassemia and sickle cell anemia) as “solutions” to the problem of malaria? Any sensible person would find the optimal solution for vision and then implement that solution in every animal that needs to see. There are around 40 different types of eyes in nature, so the hypothesis of an “intelligent” designer radically disagrees with the facts.
If ID means God, which is what its advocates want us to think, then it becomes untestable even in principle. An omnipotent being can do anything; therefore, the hypothesis that “God did it” makes no predictions about how “it” was done. Checking the theory against the facts is impossible because it can fit any facts. Furthermore, since a theory with an omnipotent being allows one to entertain any hypothesis, the theory is worse than untestable—it actually undermines everything we think we know. Will the Sun rise in the south tomorrow? It will if God wants it to! Is the Sun we see today the same Sun we saw yesterday? Maybe God made a new one overnight!
Advocates argue that we cannot know whether ID is true if science refuses to consider it. Mano Singham says that, “to be valid, science does not have to be true.” This assertion just begs for the creationist response: “So let’s test ID to see if it is valid!” The claim that theories can sometimes be useful even if untrue has some obvious merit and is a favorite of the antirealist school of philosophy of science. Antirealism holds that entities such as atoms or electric fields don’t actually exist (that is, they are not “true”), they are just useful (“valid”) fictions. The great weakness of antirealism is that it fails to explain the predictive power of scientific theories. If X doesn’t exist, then the success of theories that postulate X must be nothing more than curve fitting. But how can curve fitting successfully predict neutron stars or electromagnetic waves? Antirealism is weak enough as academic philosophy; it is hopeless as a public response to creationists.