Why Intelligent Design Cannot Be Science.

Intelligent deign is based upon the premise that the universe is being directed by some kind of intelligence, be it the Judeo-Islamo-Christian God or some other intelligent universal director. Intelligent Design was originally a theory put forward by some turn of the century philosophers to explain how science and religion are compatible. The basic premise, as put forward by Alfred North Whitehead, was that science describes mechanisms, and religion describes purpose. The difference between these two descriptions is the difference of the two meanings of the word "because."

"Because" is defined as "for the reason that" in Merriam-Websters. There are two kinds of reasons for things. One is the mechanical reason. This is the physical movement behind things. An example of mechanical reason is when a woman slaps a man, the muscle in that woman's arm twitches causing her arm to twitch, which causes her arm to flail her hand, which causes the hand to slap the man's face. That chain of events is mechanical in nature. Each causation is another step in the movement towards the slap. The other kind of reason for a thing describes purpose. The woman may have struck the man because he raped her, or because he pinched her ass, or because she remembered a man from her childhood that looked like the man. Both of these reasons are necessary to the slap. That is to say that neither of these kinds of causes are sufficient. Neither of these kinds of reasons are more or less correct or accurate than the other. However, when we are trying to figure out what caused the slap, we talk about two very different things. A biologist is needed to determine how the mechanical cause worked. A moral adjudicator (a judge, a priest, a philosopher) or social scientist of some kind is needed to determine the ultimate purpose of the slap.

Biological inquiry is ultimately an attempt to answer the question "Why does that thing work the way it does?" In the example of the woman slapping the man, biology can say, "the muscle twitched, and the arm twitched, and the hand twitched." That information is valuable for finding out which part of the arm is broken if the woman suddenly finds that she can't slap the man any longer. Biology cannot hope to answer the bigger question of why the woman decided to slap the man. The most biology can say about purpose is that the muscle twitched "because the woman told it to twitch." Similarly when someone asks why does life exist the way it does, evolution can say, "because natural selection combined with mating selection tendencies, genetic mutations" etc etc. These processes can help us understand what goes on when we have genetic diseases, cancers, or in helping Watson and Crick discover DNA. However, intelligent design theorists are attempting to answer a different kind of question. To the question "why does life exist the way it does?" they can only answer "because someone or something told it to exist." It may very well be true, but it stops the question from being asked without answering anything about the mechanics of life.

Many intelligent design theorists cite the eugenics movement as a reason why evolution is wrong. However, the eugenics movement suffered from the same flaw as intelligent design itself when it mistook mechanical cause for purpose. If science stops attempting to find mechanical cause, science ceases to be science and starts to be philosophy or religion. Biology cannot simply stop and say that "an intelligent being created that," because it would be the cessation of the act of science itself. Similarly, we philosophers, clerics, and social scientists should not allow science to hijack intelligent design because the question of what purpose lies at the root of the universe is properly ours, not the material of cold, material, mechanical scientists.