Our local paper, The York Dispatch, ran this column from the Tufts Daily a couple of weeks ago which several times repeats the claim that Intelligent Design is a religious belief. Today they carried another essay in which George Will repeats the same claim. One despairs of ever purging this misconception from the public mind, but the task is even more hopeless when public intellectuals insist on perpetuating it. It takes on the character of an ineradicable stain on the debate over Intelligent Design.
I submitted the following reply to the Dispatch whose editors have apparently decided to ignore though they have chosen not to share with me their reasons:
The editors made an unfortunate choice of columns in selecting The Creationists' Trojan Horse(11/1). Almost every assertion in the essay is either incorrect or misleading. Consider the claim, which appears regularly in both of our local papers, that Intelligent Design (ID) is religious. This judgment is simply false.
The fundamental assertion of Darwinism is that all of life has arisen solely as a consequence of blind, unguided, purposeless processes. ID is the denial of this claim. It asserts that purposeless processes are inadequate by themselves to account for what we find in the realm of living things and that one of the causal factors which must be invoked to fully account for life is intelligence. If the proposition that life is completely explicable in terms of blind, impersonal processes is a scientific claim then so is it's denial. If the proposition that life bears the impress of intelligent purpose is a religious claim then so is it's contrary.
Nevertheless, the insistent claims of its critics and the hopes of some of its advocates notwithstanding, ID is not a religious belief. It requires no commitment to belief in a god, it prescribes neither worship, rites, rituals, creeds, nor codes of conduct. It has no body of doctrine, no clergy, and no holy books. It simply holds that blind, unguided processes are inadequate by themselves to account for living things and that in some way intelligence must have played a role. This is hardly a religious assertion, and, unlike religious assertions, it may even lend itself to testing. If it could be shown, for instance, that some unintelligent, mechanistic process does indeed produce information, or an increase in information, if it could be plausibly and convincingly demonstrated that DNA or proteins could have arisen by chance through purely natural processes, then intelligent agency will have been shown to be a superfluous add-on, and ID would be effectively refuted.
It needs to be said, too, that contrary to much of what has been written in the papers, ID is not creationism. Creationism is an attempt to vindicate the Genesis account and to reconcile science with the Bible. It starts with the assumption that Genesis is true, and rejects any hypotheses incompatible with this assumption. In this respect, creationism is much more like Darwinism than it is like ID.
Darwinian evolution also begins with an assumption. In this case it's the assumption that only natural forces can be employed to account for living things. Any hypothesis that is incompatible with this assumption is rejected out of hand.
Both creationism and Darwinism, in other words, are inferences from an a priori metaphysical commitment and as such are mirror images of each other.
Indeed, ID is scarcely even related to creationism philosophically except insofar as both theories hold that an intelligence was involved in the emergence of life. To understand the vast difference between them one need only to realize that all of the book of Genesis could be proven wrong but, although creationism would be thoroughly devastated, the theory of ID would be unaffected. ID is not dependent upon Genesis or any other religious or metaphysical book or doctrine for its content.
ID starts with observations of living things and infers from the resulting empirical data that intelligence must have played a role in the development of life. As such, ID is an observation-based hypothesis and is therefore more scientific, in this sense, at least, than either of its competitors. Its inference that purpose and intentional design underlie life on earth is based not on a presupposition that there is a designer (though many ID theorists doubtless hold such a presupposition in their private lives), but rather upon several obvious facts about the world.
One of these facts is the abundance of information in living things. We have no experience of complex information being generated by purposeless processes, and thus its ubiquity (in DNA and proteins, for instance) leads to the inference that purpose plays a role in the design of life.
Another fact upon which the design inference is based is the apparent teleology in the cosmos. That life is telic (i.e. evinces purpose) is in dispute. That the cosmos is telic is much more difficult to gainsay. Cosmologists can invoke no mechanism like natural selection to explain the exquisite fine-tuning of the physics that governs the cosmos. If the universe as a whole bears witness to having been intricately engineered for life, it is plausible to think that certain aspects of the universe, like the structures in living things, which certainly appear to be designed, actually are.
Indeed, we must keep in mind that the current debate is not about whether there actually is design in the biosphere. Everyone agrees that there is. The debate is over the source of that design. Is it nature blindly selecting for survival advantage, or is it an intelligence of some kind - a stoic "World Soul", a Platonic demiurge, an idealist "Absolute", or the God of classical theism? ID offers no opinion other than to rule out blind nature.
It must be stressed, finally, that ID does not conflict with evolution, the theory of descent by modification. It conflicts only with the Darwinian version of evolution which insists that descent is a thoroughly naturalistic, mechanistic process. Evolution is simply the view that organisms share common ancestors. It does not require one to believe that the process of descent from these ancestral forms was purely accidental or unintended.
Some may indeed wish to use ID as a wedge to get religion into schools, but ID should be judged on its merits and not on the motives of some of its proponents. There are some who insist, after all, that Darwinism be taught because they see it as a "Trojan Horse" for atheism. There are others who have used evolution to justify social Darwinism and even genocide. It would be an error to judge evolution on the basis of such misuses by its supporters, and it's equally wrong to judge ID by the misuses to which some of its adherents wish to put it.
For a good example of how the media totally confuses ID with creationism see this piece in the San Francisco Chronicle.