In this blog post, we will examine why intelligent design is not recognized as science and whether it can nevertheless offer new possibilities for scientific inquiry.
Long ago, a legal battle over intelligent design erupted in the Dover area of Pennsylvania, USA. Teaching intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in science education was ruled unconstitutional. This incident sparked widespread debate across society about the relationship between science education and religion, and provided an opportunity to deeply consider the nature and limitations of intelligent design theory.
Intelligent design theory posits that the origin and development of life are the result of a designer’s intentional act, and it seeks to explore the evidence supporting this claim. This theory stems from the intuition that highly complex and intricate biological structures cannot be the product of chance. It emerged as an attempt to address questions about the mechanisms of biological evolution and to fill gaps that evolutionary theory, based on natural selection, could not explain. However, the concept of the “designer” that intelligent design theory seeks to address is highly ambiguous, and since the “designer” evokes the Christian God and proponents of intelligent design theory have presented their arguments from a Christian perspective, the theory was ruled to violate the principle of separation of church and state. As a result, intelligent design theory has been excluded from the framework of science education.
However, intelligent design theory itself focuses its scope of inquiry not on the designer but on the act of design. This theory argues that biological systems are so intricately interconnected that they cannot be explained by simple gradual changes through natural selection, using the concept of “irreducible complexity.” Presenting intelligent design theory as an explanation for the complexity of the natural world can provide a new perspective as part of scientific discourse. From this perspective, intelligent design theory can be viewed not as a religious theory but as a creative biological theory that offers a new perspective on the origin of life.
The core argument of intelligent design theory is “irreducible complexity.” Living organisms are too intricate to have been created by gradual changes through chance. If even one element that makes up a living organism is flawed, that organism loses its function, becomes diseased, or dies. A common example cited by proponents of intelligent design theory is that the probability of assembling a clock by shaking clock parts in a pocket is close to zero. Since the emergence of intelligent design theory, many scientists who believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution as the process of biological development have raised various counterarguments against intelligent design theory, and most of the arguments put forward by intelligent design theory have been refuted. However, even before determining whether intelligent design theory is incorrect, the debate over whether to accept intelligent design theory as “science” continues.
When focusing on the methodology rather than the evidence for intelligent design, intelligent design has value as a science. First, we need a definition of what science is. Generally, science refers to natural science, which is the study of various phenomena in nature through mathematical deduction and experimentation.
However, upon closer examination, not all such disciplines are recognized as science, and various positions on the definition of science have been proposed within the field of philosophy of science. In particular, verificationism and falsificationism have been regarded as representative criteria for determining whether a discipline is scientific, and they were also the main reasons why intelligent design was not accepted as science in the Dover case.
Verificationism holds that a hypothesis must be provable through empirical facts, while falsificationism holds that a hypothesis must be capable of being observed to be false. From this perspective, intelligent design is not science because the intelligent designer posited by intelligent design theory cannot be proven to exist or not exist through empirical means. However, there are many fields of study that have already been recognized as science even though empirical proof of their hypotheses is impossible.
In fields such as quantum mechanics, string theory, and parallel universe theory, it is impossible to prove the existence of electrons with probability distributions, strings as the basic units of all matter, or other universes beyond the one we live in, which are the central objects of these theories. Nevertheless, active research has been conducted in these fields for decades, and as a result, humanity enjoys the benefits of modern cutting-edge technologies such as computers and mobile phones.
Given this reality, it is not right to dismiss intelligent design as unscientific simply because it was proposed by supporters of theism and because the concept of an intelligent designer evokes the Christian God. On the other hand, it can be argued that the aforementioned fields of study can be considered scientific because they are based on other verifiable and falsifiable auxiliary hypotheses that support their central tenets.
For example, quantum mechanics applied the basic concepts of classical mechanics, such as equations describing the motion of particles and equations expressing wave changes, to a new theory called the Schrödinger equation to explain natural phenomena. Therefore, although it is impossible to actually verify whether the cat described in the Schrödinger equation exists in a state of neither life nor death, the classical mechanical concepts that led to this theory have been empirically proven by many people over hundreds of years.
However, this argument can be applied equally to intelligent design theory. Many of the natural phenomena that intelligent design proponents claim demonstrate “irreducible complexity” have been disproved by biologists, i.e., proven to be untrue through “empirical methods.” For example, the flagella used by bacteria as rotary motors, the eyes of animals that create three-dimensional and clear images, and the multiple stages of blood coagulation have been shown through various biological studies to function even when certain biological elements, such as proteins or amino acid sequences, are missing. Additionally, the concept of “specified complexity,” a key argument of William Dembski, a prominent proponent of intelligent design, is based on probability theory and information theory from existing mathematics. For example, the seemingly random and complex string “nfuijolt ju jt mjlf b xfbtfm” can be transformed into the phrase “methinks it is like a weasel” from Hamlet by shifting each letter one position to the right using the Caesar cipher. Therefore, this text can be considered specific.
Finding rules in seemingly random phenomena and discovering specificity is one of the research methods used in intelligent design to verify its validity.
Another argument against intelligent design as a scientific theory is that intelligent design has not undergone a proper verification process, particularly peer review, and is therefore not suitable as a scientific research method.
Richard Dawkins, in “Why Religion Is Not a Science,” states that peer review is “a procedure by which scientists write up their empirical research and share it with fellow experts in the field, so that hypotheses are open to research, verification, and criticism,” making it a crucial process in scientific research.
However, he argued that while more than 30 papers studying biological evidence for evolution have undergone peer review, there are no such publications on intelligent design. This is an arrogant claim by those who can be considered the mainstream of the scientific community. The reason intelligent design has not undergone sufficient peer review is also related to its social standing.
Since evolution has been accepted as established science, there has been little research on intelligent design, and naturally, no peer-reviewed research results have emerged. In this reality, the claim that intelligent design is not suitable as a scientific research method does not point to methodological errors in intelligent design but rather means that intelligent design is rejected because it differs from the existing scientific community. As a result, even though intelligent design theory can raise important new questions in scientific research, it has been completely excluded from the scientific community and has lost any opportunity for discussion.
In conclusion, intelligent design theory should not be treated as unscientific simply because it cannot be proven empirically. It is only because intelligent design theory has not been sufficiently recognized by the scientific community that it has not been accepted as science. Under these circumstances, it will inevitably take time for the recognition that intelligent design theory is an academic discipline based on scientific research methods that have undergone empirical verification to take root. However, since the value of academia lies not merely in supporting existing theories but in presenting new perspectives and exploring them, intelligent design theory should be given sufficient opportunity to be discussed and developed as a field of scientific research.
