What evidence exists for the intelligent design theory (creationism)?
So many people these days are confusing biblical creationism with intelligent design. “Intelligent Design is the study of patterns in nature that are best explained as the result of intelligence” (Dr. William Dembski). That’s it; it says nothing of who the creator is and how he/she/it/they did it. Intelligent Design encompasses every “creation” story, even aliens seeding life on this planet. As Dr. Stephen Meyer has said, “I think that the key thing that many folks in the media and many people in the general public miss, and I think this has been a somewhat unhelpful aspect of the debate, is that they have confused the idea of evidence with the idea of implication. The evidence for design is as I said this nanotechnology that we’re finding in the cell, this information embedded in DNA, for example, but the implication of the discussion does raise larger philosophical issues – and that’s true for Darwinian evolution as much as it is for its now chief competitor, the theory of intelligen
There is no actual evidence. The illusion of evidence is based on the false logic of assuming that absence of evidence constitutes evidence of absence. For example, if one cannot provide evidence for a detailed causal chain of events that constitutes a natural explanation for the origin of a given phenomenon, then ID takes that as evidence that the chain of events is not natural – that is, artificial or supernatural. One problem with this is that such “evidence” increases the *less* we know. That means the “evidence” for ID was stronger in the 1700’s than it is now, based on this logic, because fewer things could be explained in terms of natural processes then. Increasing actual evidence logically requires one’s knowledge to increase, not decrease. Another problem is that ID cannot be disproven assuming such a standard of evidence. Since we will never be able to explain *everything*, there will always be “evidence” of ID out there waiting to be “discovered” (the Discover Institute is n
The same evidence that exists for the theory of the fat man in the red suit who drags a bag of toys down your chimney: stories told by people, which are then collectively reinforced. Seriously, as to your question, read Darwin. Darwin left open the possibility of a creator…likely more of a First Cause than a mystical force involved in our daily lives, thus evidence for “intelligent design” (a code word for Creationism, ie a creator god) would be buried in pre-history and might never be uncovered.
There isn’t any, because it is provably impossible for there to be any. Without going into the details, one can see that if one interjects supernatural activity into a process, the process becomes totally unpredictable, as the supernatural phenomena do not (by definition!) follow any rules. Thus, no consequences of such a theory can be derived, so no evidence of such consequences can be found.
