What is Intelligent Design? Well, simply put, Intelligent Design is the idea that “design” requires “intelligence.”
Now, before you say, “Well, duh!,” you might be surprised at how many people will look at a good claw hammer with a graphite shaft and say, “That’s intelligent design,” but then look at the hand holding it and say, “That’s random chance.”
The typical claw hammer has three or four parts. There’s the head, usually cast and then machined out of some kind of metal, usually an alloy of more than one type of metal. Then there’s a shaft, made from wood or steel or graphite or some other rigid material. The shaft is usually wrapped in some kind of compliant rubber or plastic to improve the grip and reduce blistering. And in many cases some kind of wedge driven into the end of the shaft that is stuck into the head to prevent the head from coming off.
When you look at all those parts, shaped in particular ways, made from materials with particular characteristics, joined together in a particular way, all to serve a particular function, you just know that hammer was designed.
And you just know there was a designer.
And you just know the designer was intelligent. Maybe not like Einstein the physicist, but certainly more so than Einstein the dog.
The human hand, on the other hand, doesn’t have three or four parts. It has twenty-nine major and minor bones (plus or minus … many people have a few more, and everyone counts these things differently), twenty-nine major joints, at least one-hundred-twenty-three named ligaments, thirty-four muscles which move the fingers and thumb, forty-eight named nerves, and thirty named arteries (and nearly as many smaller named branches).
Does that sound like design, or random chance?
Science is the study of the world around us, whether biology, cosmology, geology, or whatever. Science is also the search for causes. We observe the way things are, and we search for what caused things to be just that way.
In virtually every field of science, we encounter things that look like they had to have been designed. We’ll take a deeper look at some of those things in upcoming posts. Maybe they were designed. Maybe they weren’t. Maybe there’s a credible alternate explanation.
The Intelligent Design movement says, “Let’s at least consider the possibility that design might be the cause.”
You may think that an obvious course.
But you may also be surprised how many modern scientists will vehemently object, willing only to consider “natural” causes.
“God isn’t science!”
Well, yes. God isn’t science.
But if God is, or even might be, is it still science if you ignore reality? If it really was designed, but you insist that you won’t accept that explanation, is that science?
All we’re asking is that you consider the possibility.