Fair questions Pygo. At one level ID is just a great piece of re-branding. I see it was launched to the world in 1989 with the publication of
Of Pandas and People, a book written as a response to a US court case about creationism. Just before the book was published all mentions of ‘creationism’ were edited out and replaced with the words ‘Intelligent Design’ (a term the author apparently derived from a NASA scientist). Hey presto, a theistic book suddenly becomes a science text book!
But from a positive point of view it doesn't have to be just a synonym for creationism and it achieves more than just re-branding. For instance, it makes it easier to look at the ideas expressed with less risk of treading on religious toes. It helps us to talk about issues in evolution whilst laying aside the specific issues connected with faith in Allah, or God, or whatever. (Although they are certainly lurking just around the corner.)
ID seeks only to demonstrate that a particular evolutionary step cannot be explained entirely by natural processes. (For instance the original formation of amino acids, DNA based replication processes etc – I am reading your links thank you MustafaMc!). It doesn’t have to attack the whole structure, even one little piece will do. The objective is to create a gap in the scientific explanation which theism is on hand to fill. ID has a lower burden of proof than creationism, as it were.
Supposing we stop arguing
between ID and evolution, and just assume ID is correct. The first obvious question is, if there is Intelligent Design, what kind of intelligence is it? Does it have a consistent personality? Does it have characteristics or patterns of behaviour? If we knew this we could understand the world better and perhaps discover cures for cancer etc.
It seems to me that this Intelligent Designer has some or all of the following characteristics. For the sake of linguistic convenience I’m going to call ‘it’ a ‘he’. For now, I’m also going to use only anthropomorphic notions.
I am not talking about Allah, I am talking about an Intelligent Designer. You may disagree with some of the questions and I’m sure you can think of others. But remember, whoever he is, this Designer can do anything he wants, he has infinite power. Unlike Nature, whatever we see in the world is not random, it’s there because he put it there.
I’ve reshaped a few of your questions Pygo in the context of a personality:
- He is enormously patient. (The timescale of the universe and evolution is immense).
- Mankind doesn’t seem to be his main focus. (We have been on this world a fraction of the time available, and the universe is ridiculously larger than it needs to be.)
- At heart he is not a scientist, he is an artist. Nature is crazy and exuberant!
- He is a terrific mechanic.
- Yet, paradoxically some of his machines don’t work properly without further direct intervention from him. (Evolution, for instance.) If it were a man-made machine you would wonder if there was a different guy on the job sometimes.
- He has a sense of humour (and not just because of clown fish).
- Either he is a tease, or he is deliberately laying tricks for us, and especially for poor unfortunate scientists like Darwin. (Why bother to lay a fossil trail that looks like evolution? There was never any need to have fossils at all.)
- He is, at the very least, indifferent to suffering. (Nature is a battleground.)
- More than that, he can be cruel. (As I write this, I am listening to a radio interview with a woman with a bizarre nervous tic, that compels her to repeat the word ‘biscuit’ in the middle of every sentence. It’s funny, but not for her. What an extraordinary defect to create.)
- He is both creative, yet also strangely unimaginative. (Nature has terrific variety but it repeats itself. If all things are possible, why is Nature limited?)
- He is sometimes indecisive. It looks like he started a job, left off, then came back later. (We see evolutionary dead ends, or perhaps two ways to solve the same problem in a single creature.)
- The world looks like a labour of love, yet it has in-built obsolescence. (If all those meteorites miss us, the dying Sun won’t!)
- If I look back at all this, and I had to name someone this profile seemed to fit, it would be the author Terry Pratchett. (He is a science fiction writer who imagines worlds with ironic divine intelligences behind them.)
Those are a few questions that occur to me. Obviously there could be many others, or you might have a different view of some of the above. I stress, I am talking about an Intelligent Designer (as the phrase invites me to do)
not Allah or God.
Perhaps there are reasons for all of those things that are not readily apparent to us. Maybe it is all part of the test for who will believe and who will disbelieve
You're re-introducing a deity here. When you put Allah or God into the equation then it would change most of the answers and some of the questions. But if you always need an Allah or God for Intelligent Design to make sense, then why bother with the term ID in the first place? It just gets in the way doesn't it?