Intelligent Designer - Criticism

Criticism

Intelligent design has been presented by its proponents as a "big tent" strategy into which several accounts of creation can fit. Were a "scientific" version of intelligent design approved for inclusion in public school science curricula, then a path would be opened for discussion of alternatives to not only natural selection but naturalism as well, and eventually religious accounts on the origin of life. The vast majority of scientists reject the concept of intelligent design and an intelligent designer. Instead, the most widely accepted explanation is that physical processes such as natural selection can account for the complexity of life and other phenomena and features of the universe. Attempts to insert theories of intelligent design into public school science curricula fits in with the intelligent design movement's social aims, via the overturning of Western secularism as detailed in the Wedge strategy. The concept of the intelligent designer has been criticised as a God-of-the-gaps argument. Introducing the hypothesis of an intelligent designer introduces the unsolved problem of accounting for the origin of such a designer (first cause).

By raising the question of the need for a designer for objects with irreducible complexity, intelligent design also raises the question, "what designed the designer?" Richard Dawkins has argued that "If complex organisms demand an explanation, so does a complex designer. And it's no solution to raise the theologian's plea that God (or the intelligent designer) is simply immune to the normal demands of scientific explanation," since such an answer would be unscientific. With religious creationism, the question "what created God?" can be answered with theological arguments, but in intelligent design, the chain of designers can be followed back indefinitely in an infinite regression, leaving the question of the creation of the first designer dangling. As a result, intelligent design does not explain how the complexity happened in the first place; it just moves it.

Elliott Sober says that by intelligent design's own arguments, a designer capable of creating irreducible complexity must also be irreducibly complex: "Any mind in nature that designs and builds an irreducibly complex system is itself irreducibly complex" Sober says that this an argument that intelligent design proponents still need to respond to.

If intelligent design proponents invoke an uncaused causer or deity to resolve this problem, they contradict a fundamental assumption of intelligent design that design requires a designer and reduce intelligent design to religious creationism. Another possible counter-argument might be an infinite regression of designers. However, admitting infinite numbers of objects also allows any arbitrarily improbable event to occur, such as an object with "specific" complexity assembling itself by chance. Again, this contradicts a fundamental assumption of intelligent design that a designer is needed for every specifically complex object, producing a logical contradiction.

Critics contend the claim that positing a designer which explains gaps in our understanding yet does not need to be itself explained as not a contribution to knowledge but as a thought-terminating cliché.