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Intelligent Design is creationism

James Randerson

It has no place in science classes.

"WE ARE seeking to have intelligent design and criticisms of Darwinism taught in science lessons." That was Richard Buggs, of the U.K. campaign group "Truth in Science," putting the case for teaching Intelligent Design in British schools this week. Proponents of ID claim that it is a viable scientific alternative to Darwinism. As such, they say, it deserves a place alongside Darwin in science lessons.

Who could argue with that? Darwin's theory has been around for nearly 150 years and has survived many challenges. Why not throw in ID too? Isn't education all about exposing children to ideas and letting them make up their own minds, not force-feeding them dogma?

This argument has been well used by ID's proponents in the U.S. and it appears to be gaining ground in the U.K. It was recently revealed that dozens of British schools appear to be using teaching materials that promote the idea.

Pulling off a coup

By framing the debate in this way, the creationists — and, yes, they are creationists — have pulled off an impressive rhetorical coup. They have cast the scientists as dogmatic, reactionary, and even fundamentalist aggressors who would deny school pupils the chance to hear all sides of the debate.

In reality, ID is not a new idea at all, but one that goes back to Descartes and beyond. The Christian philosopher William Paley, in 1802, asked his readers to imagine finding a watch while walking on a heath. The intricate timepiece is so complex that we immediately assume a designer must have built it. The natural world is infinitely more complex than a mere pocket watch, so we should infer the hand of a designer here as well.

The ID movement has spun Paley's argument into more 21st-century terms — less pocket watch and more fancy molecular biology. How, they ask, can the intricate microscopic machines that propel bacteria have come about by chance? Such complexity must have originated with a designer.

It is true that complex things in nature look as if they have been designed. Darwin knew this. But the sublime truth about his theory is that it explains how complex things can come about without design. And natural selection works just as well for molecular machines as it does for eyes, flippers, and wings. ID, by comparison, explains nothing. It is an intellectual dead end marked: "The designer did it." Why bother trying to understand the natural world when there is the cosy God-explanation in all-too-easy reach?

ID was itself designed as a Trojan horse for creationism, with its origins in the Discovery Institute, a think-tank in Seattle whose stated aim is "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

Even a conservative judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, saw through the sham last year when he heard a case brought by parents who objected to ID being taught in their school. "Intelligent design is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory," he wrote in his judgment.

Let us be honest: despite its scientific-sounding frills and baubles, ID is pure religion. It is a reincarnation of an old idea that Darwin dispensed with and it has no place in a science class.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(James Randerson is a Guardian science correspondent.)

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