DR. Domain Sales

Why did the Creationists think it was such a great IDea to evolve into Intelligent Designers when the most successful design is bacteria?

      When I first considered Intelligent Design (I.D.) as a realistic alternative to evolution, I wasn’t particularly excited by the prospect. Surely it was a matter of Science versus Religion with the Creationists hijacking the moniker of ‘intelligent’ to give their ideas credibility.

  But why bother? Why was it important to the creationists to turn their beliefs into science? In America, where the ID term originated, according to a 2009 Gallup Poll, only 39% even believe in evolution. And of the rest of the world there is an even lower  percentage of the population who have actually  heard of it. So if creationism has been around since the beginning of time why is evolution a threat and if it is, why is it not common knowledge?

          For a start, Darwin’s ‘The Origin of  Species’ which introduces the idea of evolution , has only been around for a century and a half. In terms of evolution, not even close to a blink of an eye. The Universe has been around for 13.7 billion years but it took around another 9 billion years for the appearance of the Sun and Earth. About 4 billion years after that came the earliest life forms with the first homo sapiens making an appearance a mere 160,000 years ago.

  However, the Bible time line, recounting God’s creation of the world, begins only 6,000 years ago. (Did you know specific events in the bible can be dated very accurately, for example the Great Flood began on the 17th May 2344 B.C.) So, there’s obviously a major discrepancy, but with God backing up your statistics, why the need to hide behind a new term?

          The reason is education. The Creation, as recounted in the bible, was being taught in schools as scientific fact. This was challenged by a law stating that religious beliefs could not be taught as science. So how did the creationists get round the problem and how did it turn into Intelligent Design?

     In the beginning were the Creationists and the irony of them evolving into Intelligent Designers is not lost.

   It seems at first that the anti evolutionists were trying to preserve some dignity. Who wouldn’t be insulted to be related to a Great Ape, never mind a piece of coral. But mainly it is simply that the ideas are not compatible with the Bible. In the same way that Earth was displaced from being at the centre of everywhere by Nicolus Copernicus and relegated to being another lump of rock orbiting one of billions of stars in billions of universes etc. so too is man displaced from his elevated status by evolution. The creationists have man and ‘his’ creatures fully formed when they appear on the planet. This served the American creationists well until the law there was changed . This judgement led to The Wedge Strategy which was a paper outlining a policy to uncouple creationism from religion and the supernatural and relaunch it as a science. Hence the creation of Intelligent Design. The intelligent designers state that life is too complicated to have developed on its own and that someone or something, never specified, must have designed it i.e. a creator. They use science to back this up saying new discoveries in genetics and DNA are too complicated to have evolved by themselves and therefore man and ‘his’ creatures must have been fully formed when they appeared on this planet. They also insisted that this was very different to creationism.

    However, the Discovery Institute, who helped invent the term in 1984, was exposed during the Dover school trial as creating its own missing link when it was discovered that the ‘new’ Intelligent Design texts were identical to Creationist Texts; the only difference being the exchange of the words ‘creationist’ to ‘intelligent design’. Unfortunately, in their haste to adapt the texts, some of the key words had not been fully deleted and the word creationist had become merged with its replacement to create the evolution of a brand new term; crintelligentdesignist. And proof that the Intelligent design and creationism are the same.

  But this is where the idea becomes interesting. The I.D.ers are very vague about who or what this creator is. If you were going to design a planet and populate it, why would you allow 99% of  your species to become extinct. And of those who survive, why would your design allow so many mutations and complications, leading to disabilities and disease. Why would your most successful occupant be bacteria?

The Intelligent Designers usually fight their corner by suggesting education should be fair and balanced and say that all options should be provided when discussing the origins of the world. I fully agree. But I think the Intelligent Designers should be careful what they wish for. Perhaps being open minded about who or what this ‘designer’ is, may not be to their liking.