Intelligent Design (Divine Design)


"The proper way to assess any theory is to weigh its explanatory advantages against those of every extant rival. Neo-Darwinian natural selection is endlessly fruitful, enjoying corroboration from an imposing array of disciplines, including paleontology, genetics, systematics, embryology, anatomy, biogeography, biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology, physical anthropology, and ethology. By contrast, intelligent design lacks any naturalistic causal hypotheses and thus enjoys no consilience with any branch of science. Its one unvarying conclusion— "God must have made this thing" Frederick Crews - The New York Review of Books

"A God who creates a universe that results in humans through purely natural processes, is more intelligent than a God whose creation needs constant supervision and tinkering!" Editor, AiS

"Evolution is a robust scientifically derived observation that has been tested and confirmed again and again over the past 150 years.  Intelligent design is not science at all, but a well-financed political and religious campaign to muddy science, and introduce religion in the classroom." Editor, AiS
 

Some August 2005 articles of note devastating the "intelligent design is science" argument:

Archived Articles

Bartelt - Review of Behe's Darwin's Black Box 
Catalano - Some Published Works on Biochemical Evolution
Crews - Review of books by Dembski, Behe, Well, Miller, Ruse & Haught
Dawkins - The information Challenge
Dennett - Show Me the Science
Fitelson et al. - How Not to Detect Design - A very technical refutation of Dembski
Futuyma - Miracles and Molecules
Kidder - Review of Phil Johnson's Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds
Korthof - Does Irreducible Complexity Refute neo-Darwinism?
McGough - Bad Science, Bad Theology
Meert - ID: Constant Tampering by a Designer?
Miller - Collection of Articles on the Failure of "Intelligent Design:"
     - Review of Darwin's Black Box
     - Design on the Defensive
     - The Mousetrap Defended
     - McDonald - A Reducibly Complex Mousetrap
     - The Collapse of Irreducible Complexity
Mooney - Inferior Design

Natural History Report: Inteligent Design - Behe, Dembski, Wells, Miller, Pennock, Scott.
Orr - Darwin v. Intelligent Design (Again)
Orr - Why Intelligent Design Isn't
Pigliucci - Design Yes, Intelligent No - An excellent critique of ID
Shallit - Devastating review of Dembski's arguments
Shermer - ID: Not Intelligent, Surely Not Science
Shermer - God & Evolution -Why science & Religion are incompatable.
TalkDesign - Assessing ID claims from mainstream science
     - TalkDesign FAQs

Wein - A detailed critique of William Dembski's 'No Free Lunch"

Wein's essay is a remarkable piece of work.  Together with a group of mathematicians, physicists, and biologists, it is a clear exposition of the failure of Dembski's and Behe's arguments.  He concludes his review of Dembski's "No Free Lunch" and ID in general with these remarks-----

"No Free Lunch is characterized by muddled thinking, fallacious arguments, errors, equivocation and misleading use of technical jargon. Once these are cleared up, the following conclusions become apparent:

• The chance-elimination method is nothing but a god-of-the-gaps-argument. It merely tells us to infer design when we have rejected all the non-design hypotheses we can think of.

• In applying the chance-elimination method to a biochemical system (the bacterial flagellum), Dembski has failed to consider evolutionary explanations involving change of function. Instead, he merely considers and rejects an absurd hypothesis based on purely random combination of parts--the tornado in a junkyard scenario
  .
• The No Free Lunch theorems have no applicability to biological evolution
  .
• The argument from alleged fine-tuning of fitness functions turns out to be just a trivial variation on the well-known argument from cosmological and terrestrial fine-tuning.
   
• Dembski's idiosyncratic concepts of complexity and information are misleading, and his so-called Law of Conservation of Information is fatally flawed.
   
• Specified complexity (CSI) is not a marker of intelligent design. If specified complexity is determined according to the uniform-probability interpretation, then natural processes are perfectly capable of generating it. If it is determined by the chance-elimination method, then specified complexity is just a disguise for the god-of-the-gaps argument.
   
• Dembski's claims about statistics, information theory, evolutionary algorithms and thermodynamics have not undergone peer review and have not been accepted by the experts in those fields.

In short, No Free Lunch is completely worthless, except as a work of pseudoscientific rhetoric aimed at a mathematically unsophisticated audience which may mistake its mathematical mumbo jumbo for genuine erudition."