Professor of Anthropology Chris Toumey has some advice for his colleagues:
Our discipline of anthropology ought to take the intelligent design agenda seriously, and should actively oppose it, for two reasons: First, it is wrong for our public schools to mislead students. Secondly, intelligent design is a prominent feature of the so-called culture wars. Each victory for intelligent design in the classroom or the courtroom makes it easier to discredit the accounts of human origins that we generate in anthropology, along with the methods and concepts that guide our work.
I thought scientists opposed hypotheses because they believed them to be false, or because they lack the explanatory power of the favored hypothesis, not because they discredit their own position.
In any event, Mr. Toumey goes on to list four themes that anthropologists should stress in debating ID proponents. All four of them are irrelevant to Intelligent Design. For anti-IDers to employ any of them would be as smart as picking up a rattlesnake by the tail:
Gaps Argument: The core of intelligent design theory is the belief that, because we do not know the entire natural history of a complex phenomenon, it must be a miracle. This is too goofy to be either science or science education.
This is precisely wrong. ID is not predicated on what we don't know, it's based on what we do know. What we do know is that specified complexity (information), such as we find in living things, is not generated by blind, purposeless processes or random chance. It's generated by intelligent minds.
Are All Creators Equal? Intelligent design advocates pretend not to identify the Intelligent Designer, but use a wink and a nod to point to the conservative Christian portrait of the Judeo-Christian creator. Let there be a price to pay for being too cute. Just as the creationist effort to authenticate Noah's Flood makes the Babylonian hero Utnapishtem and the Sumerian Ziusudra just as real as the Biblical Noah, so the intelligent design effort to steer people to a creator god makes Kali, Allah and other non-Christian gods just as valid as the Christian god.
This is as dumb as saying that evolution advocates pretend not to be driven by atheistic materialism, but we know they are, so evolution is false. The designer may be the God of the Bible, many ID advocates believe that it is, but ID itself doesn't lead to that conclusion. For all we know the designer could well be an inhabitant of some other universe in the multiverse that physicists speculate about. If there can be other worlds why is it so difficult to accept that one of those worlds could contain beings capable of creating this world?
Evidence of Incompetent Design: The supposed proof of intelligent design consists of biological structures or behavior that work perfectly, or nearly perfectly. In other words, a simplistic biological functionalism. The counterproof includes vestigial structures that don't work anymore, or that put a creature at a disadvantage, plus anything else in anatomy or behavior which is not perfect.
This is an argument, such as it is, against belief that the designer is the omnipotent, omniscient God of the Bible. It has nothing at all to do with ID. After all, even an incompetent designer is still a designer. Parenthetically, even if the designer of this world didn't get everything right, it still turned in a pretty impressive performance.
Question the Single Alternative Science: Advocates of intelligent design say they want to broaden the public school science curriculum by adding "alternatives to evolution." Challenge them also to take the next logical step and add alternatives to astronomy and chemistry, and see whether conservative Christian parents are willing to include astrology and alchemy in their children's science courses.
This tactic is an indicator of the paucity of good arguments available to ID's opponents. Neither astrology nor alchemy are live options in the physical sciences. In the biological sciences, however, there are two alternatives: Either the information which fills the biosphere is the product solely of material forces or it is, at least in part, the product of intelligent agency. There are no other options, and both of these are live.
In the physical sciences there are also two options: Either the parameters, constants, forces and other properties of the physico-chemical universe are the product of purely naturalistic coincidence or they are the product of intentional engineering. There are no other options besides these, both of which are live. Throwing other creation myths, alchemy, or astrology into the mix is simply an attempt to blow smoke in peoples' eyes so that they won't see the real alternatives with which we are confronted in this debate.
Teach students the facts about the fine-tuned structure of the universe and then ask them which they think it is, chance or intelligence, that is responsible for the phenomena. Show them the computer generated videos of protein synthesis such as are found in the video The Mystery of Life's Origin and ask students whether they think this process is solely the result of chance and natural forces or whether they think it required some intelligent agency.
The vast majority of young people will agree that to believe that it's just a matter of chance and physics takes more faith than what they can muster. That's why secularists don't want students to know that there actually are alternatives to the materialist orthodoxy. They know that their metaphysics requires a superhuman exertion of will on the part of young people to believe it.
Here's a prediction I might have made before, but I'll reiterate: Because the evidence of intentional design is so strong in both the physical and biological world, as time goes on, materialists will increasingly encourage science teachers to down-play in their classes the wonders with which they seek to dazzle their students. The more teachers fill their students' minds with the fantastic truths of nature, the materialists will implicitly argue, the harder it will be to keep the young ones from wandering off the materialist plantation.
Of course, if they are ever successful in "sanitizing" science, it will mark the beginning of the end of scientific investigation and discovery because fewer students will be inspired to study it.
