Intelligent design is a theory that explains the origin of life as an act of design by an intelligent designer, and that complex biological structures cannot be the product of chance. The scientific validity of the theory is controversial, and it is considered non-scientific by the established scientific community because it cannot be verified. However, the theory of intelligent design deserves to be reevaluated because it has the potential to offer a new perspective on scientific inquiry.
A few years ago, a legal battle over intelligent design erupted in Dover, Pennsylvania, USA. The teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in science education was ruled unconstitutional. The case sparked a major debate in society about the relationship between science education and religion, and provided an opportunity to reflect on the nature and limits of intelligent design.
Intelligent design is a theory that views the origin and development of life as an act of design by some intelligent designer and explores the rationale for this. These theories start with the intuition that highly complex and sophisticated biological structures cannot be the product of chance. It emerged in response to questions about the mechanisms of biological evolution in particular, and as an attempt to fill in the gaps left unexplained by the theory of evolution by natural selection. However, the concept of the “designer” that intelligent design theory seeks to address is very vague, and the theory has been ruled to violate the principle of separation of church and state because the “designer” is reminiscent of the Christian God, and because intelligent design advocates present the theory from a Christian perspective. As a result, intelligent design is currently excluded from science education.
However, intelligent design theory itself focuses its inquiry on the act of design, not on an intelligent designer. Through the concept of “irreducible complexity,” the theory argues that biological systems are so intricately intertwined that they cannot be explained simply as step-by-step changes driven by natural selection. As such, presenting intelligent design as an explanation for the complexity of the natural world can provide a fresh perspective as part of the scientific debate. From this perspective, however, intelligent design is not a religious theory, but rather a creative biological theory that sheds new light on the origin of life.
The central argument of intelligent design is irreducible complexity. Living things are too sophisticated to have arisen by chance through gradual change. If just one of the components that make up an organism goes wrong, the organism loses its function and becomes sick or dies. A common example used by intelligent designers is that the probability of assembling a watch by putting watch materials in your pocket and shaking them is close to zero. Since its inception, many scientists who believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution as the process of biological development have argued various objections to intelligent design, and most of the arguments against intelligent design have been refuted. However, even before the fact that intelligent design is wrong, there is still a debate about whether it should be accepted as a science. When we focus on the methodology rather than the evidence, intelligent design deserves to be considered science.
First, we need to define what science is. Generally speaking, science refers to the natural sciences, the study of various phenomena in nature through mathematical deduction and experimentation. However, not all of these disciplines are recognized as science, and different positions on how to define science have been proposed within the field of philosophy of science. In particular, verificationism and disproversialism have been considered the main criteria for determining whether a discipline is science or not, and were the main reasons why intelligent design was rejected as science in the Dover controversy. Verificationism requires that a hypothesis can actually be proven by empirical facts, while disprovability requires that a counterfactual can be observed. From this perspective, intelligent design is not science because it cannot be empirically proven to exist or proven not to exist.
However, there are a number of disciplines that are already recognized as science even if their hypotheses cannot be empirically proven. Quantum mechanics, string theory, and parallel universe theory cannot prove the existence of the central objects of their theories: electrons with probability distributions, strings as the fundamental unit of everything, or universes other than our own. Nevertheless, these fields of study have been actively researched for decades, and as a result, humanity has benefited from modern cutting-edge technologies such as computers and cell phones. Given this reality, it is not right to treat the unprovability of intelligent design as unscientific simply because it is advocated by a theistic proponent and because it reminds us of the Christian God.
On the other hand, it can be argued that the aforementioned kinds of disciplines can be considered science because they are studied with other verifiable and disprovable secondary hypotheses that support their central content. For example, quantum mechanics applies the basic concepts of classical mechanics, such as the equations describing the motion of particles and the evolution of waves, to a new theory called the Schrödinger equation to explain natural phenomena. So, while we can’t actually verify that the cat in the Schrödinger equation is neither dead nor alive, the concepts of classical mechanics that led to the theory have been empirically verified by many people for hundreds of years.
But the same argument can be applied to intelligent design theory. Many natural phenomena that exhibit the “irreducible complexity” that intelligent designers claim have been disproved by biologists, i.e., “proven” not to be true through “empirical methods. For example, the flagella used by bacteria as rotating motors, the eyes of animals that create three-dimensional, sharp images, and blood that exhibits multiple stages of clotting have been shown in multiple biological studies to function even when some biological elements, such as proteins or amino acid sequences, are missing. The “specified complexity” advocated by William Dembski, a leading proponent of intelligent design, is also based on probability theory and information theory from traditional mathematics. For example, the seemingly random and complex string “nfuijolt ju jt mjlf b xfbtfm” can be moved back one letter in the alphabet by the Caesar’s cipher to reveal a line from Hamlet: “methinks it is like a weasel.” Thus, the text can be considered specified.
This is one of the ways in which intelligent design uses the method of verification to discover specificity by looking for rules in seemingly coincidental phenomena.
Another argument against intelligent design as a scientific theory is that it has not been subjected to this kind of verification, especially since none of its claims have been peer-reviewed, making it unsuitable as a scientific research method. In Why Religion Is Trying to Be Science, Richard Dawkins argues that “peer review is a process by which scientists write up their empirical research and share it with fellow experts in the same field, so that hypotheses are open to scrutiny, verification, and criticism.” However, he points out that over 30 papers examining the biological evidence for evolution have all been peer-reviewed, while intelligent design has no such publications.
This is an arrogant claim by those who are considered mainstream in the scientific community. The reason why intelligent design has not received sufficient peer review is also related to its social standing. Because evolutionary theory has been accepted as orthodoxy within science, intelligent design has not been studied as much, and naturally, peer-reviewed research has not been published. In this reality, the claim that intelligent design is unsuitable as a scientific research method does not point to methodological errors in intelligent design, but rather to the fact that intelligent design itself has been ostracized because it differs from the established scientific community. This results in a situation where intelligent design theory is not even given the opportunity to be discussed because the theory itself has been thoroughly excluded from the scientific community, despite the fact that it could raise important new issues in scientific research.
In conclusion, intelligent design should not be treated as non-science simply because it cannot be empirically proven. It is only not recognized as science because it has not been sufficiently recognized by the scientific community to date. Given this reality, it will take time for intelligent design to be recognized as a discipline based on empirically supported scientific research methods. However, since the value of science is not simply to support existing theories, but also to present and explore new perspectives, intelligent design should be given ample opportunity to be discussed and developed as a branch of scientific research.
