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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Why "Intelligent Design" Doesn't Make Sense

"It would have to be imperfect design or incompetent design or inept design, but not intelligent design," Francisco Ayala, a biologist at the University of California, Irvine and an ordained Dominican priest, said last night during his Distinguished Lecture Series talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The human jaw, the human birth canal and the forelimbs are not perfect. The jaw has to have teeth pulled, the molars and the rest of the teeth straightened to fit. The birth canal doesn’t fit the head of the baby. And what engineer would design limbs for running, swimming, swinging with the same materials performed in the same way? He would be fired.”
ID doesn't jibe with the idea of a benevolent creator God, he said, and it's not science because we can't test the theory and there isn't any evidence.
Natural selection, on the other hand, is "Darwin’s gift to science, his gift to religion,” he said. “It made it possible to explain the dysfunction, the cruelty, the sadism of the way of life rather than the idea of a creator. It’s more the result of natural processes.”

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Francisco Ayala said:
It would have to be imperfect design or incompetent design or inept design, but not intelligent design

This is exactly what you would expect to find if there were some constant natural physical need for life, and even for "intelligent" life, like these scientists have posited here.

But unfortunately for science, few look into it from this perspective because both sides *automatically* see god in evidence that looks that much *like* god, so one side makes the unfounded leap of faith, while the other just pretends like evidence for stuff like this is meaningless.

Ideological predisposing makes a real picnic for the whole two or three of us that are actually interested in the truth.